


evening tide, what do you hide?

by hakyeonni



Category: VIXX
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Shipwrecked, Anal Sex, Angst with a Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, First Time, Happy Ending, M/M, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Sailing, Slow Burn, Strangers to Lovers, mysterious stranger! taekwoon, sea captain! hongbin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-13 09:53:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 59,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18029459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hakyeonni/pseuds/hakyeonni
Summary: shipwrecked and washed up on an island that seems as alive as the sea surrounding it, hongbin must readjust to his new life, but the longer he spends on the island, the more he realises that all is not as it seems... and the island isn't about to give up her secrets easily.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> just a simple shipwreck au... or is it 🤔

_evening tide, what do you hide?_   
_damnation or salvation?_

At first, the man in the distance is just a speck on the horizon, arriving with the sun.

Taekwoon sits and watches as the sea brings him closer and closer, heart in his throat, thoughts crashing through his mind and making him dizzy. There is nothing he can do about this man—if the sea wants to bring him here, bring him here she shall—but he wishes and he hopes right up until the man washes up on the rocky shore and it’s far too late. From where Taekwoon’s sitting, high up, the man looks very small indeed. His clothes are torn, hair plastered to his face, and he’s clinging so tightly to a large piece of driftwood that his knuckles are bleeding, the scarlet standing out against his skin like a beacon.

He does not stir. Taekwoon watches him for an age, watches for any sign of movement, and when he turns and disappears into the safety of his caves, he hopes—for the man’s sake—that he’s dead.

It’s better that way.

 

***

 

Hongbin hears the crack of thunder, the horrible heaving sound of metal shearing beneath his feet, and his eyes snap open as he gasps. He’s dead, he’s dead, he must be, he can’t—

His flailing brings him onto his knees, and finally his brain registers what he’s seeing. It’s not what he saw the last time he closed his eyes, which was _Drachen_ sinking beneath waves impossibly giant. It’s not even anything he recognises. Rocks, sea—he rubs his eyes and squints and everything comes into focus.

He has, it seems, washed up on an island. It’s strangely shaped; he’s staring up at two enormous jutting spires of stone with odd horizontal spikes here and there, a wide rocky path between them. The rock itself is a strange colour, too; it’s a pale cream, pock-marked in places. He can see green foliage growing halfway up, leaves swaying gently in the wind. When he gets to his feet and looks to the south, he can see other islands, huge curves of rock hanging over the sea.

_What on earth?_

There’s something about the shape of the spires that triggers an unease at the back of his mind, but he can’t focus on it, doesn’t allow himself to. He compartmentalises. _Drachen_ was wrecked—he remembers that. He must have clung to the piece of wood lying at his feet, what looks to be a piece of a pallet, and the sea must have carried him here. Where here is, he has no idea, but he has more pressing issues. When he inhales raggedly and steps forward, a shooting, sharp pain ricochets through his ribs and brings him to his knees with a grunt. He swears, wrapping both arms around his middle.

Shipwrecked on the strangest island he’s ever seen with a fractured rib. Brilliant.

He starts towards the two spires slowly, taking care to pick his way over the rocks. He figures that, given how pockmarked the rocks are and with how much greenery there is, there’s a good chance of finding fresh water somewhere up there. By compartmentalising like this—find water, focus on his rib, then work out where to go from there—he can keep himself sane. He hopes.

It’s not until he’s standing in between the two spires that he realises something even stranger. The one to his right is fully formed, tunnels into the rock dotted all over the place, but the one to his left… He looks at it for a long while, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing. It’s an arch, a huge, pointed arch with spikes sticking out of it. He has never seen anything like it, in all the years he’s been at sea, and once again the unease grows—

 _No_. Breathe. Focus. Compartmentalise. He lets his mind empty and hones in on his body’s needs, and what his body needs right now is water.

He picks a tunnel at random, still shuffling slowly because every normal step sends pain shooting through him. This one slopes down, not where he wants to go, but he follows it anyway because the thought of turning around and walking uphill nearly brings tears to his eyes. When it finally opens out, he’s in an enormous cavern, the ceiling incredibly high above him. It smells like damp and gloom and he starts shivering almost instantly. He can’t—he can’t _focus_ , his eyes are darting all over the place, and when he goes to swallow he finds he cannot. His throat is tight, a vice around his neck, and a shiver runs down his spine as his vision begins to go black at the edges. He is alone, he is alone in this horrific place, he needs water, he needs to get out of here he needs to _get off this island_ , and before he knows it he’s turning around and stumbling back through the tunnel he just came through. When he reaches outside again he blindly heads for the next tunnel, every breath hurting now as he pants horribly, the rasping noise echoing off the rocks around him and just making him feel all the more claustrophobic.

This tunnel slopes upwards, and although he’s thankful he’s not sure he can make it. The panic is setting in and making him hyperventilate, and he struggles to walk without screaming from the pain. He can feel nothing else but the hundreds of tons of rock pressing down above his head. It’s oppressive, and the feeling does not abate even though he swears he walks for hours. When the tunnel opens up into a cave in the rock, one side open to the elements, he collapses onto the sandy ground with the relief of it all.

He doesn’t even know how long he lies there. He can’t get his aching muscles to move, and doesn’t want to, anyway; the sand he’s lying on is the softest thing he’s felt all day, and he can just lie there and watch the light slowly fade from the sky. He deliberately keeps his thoughts empty. He does not think of his rib, or the dryness in his throat, or the faces of his parents, or the way _Drachen_ had groaned as she sunk. He lies there and revels in his nothingness, ignoring the hopelessness, and breathes.

In the end it’s his thirst that makes him move. Sunset is not far away, and he does not want to go stumbling around this horrible tower of rock in the dark lest he falls off the edge. In fact, it’s not until he gets to his feet—slowly, like an old man—that he realises just how high up he is, and despite himself the view mesmerises him. From here, the sea is a beautiful aqua colour, flat as glass and incredibly inviting. The wind whips his face, bringing with it the scent of salt and brine, and when he looks down he can see that, from this height, the rocks he washed up on don’t seem so uneven and rough.

He turns away from the view reluctantly, taking in his surroundings once more. There’s the tunnel he came in through, and a sliver in the rock wall that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up once he slips through. It leads to a path cut into the side of the spire, open to the air, but that in itself is ordinary enough—nature has a strange way of forming tracks. What makes a pang of fear shoot through him is the fact that the bare rock beneath his feet is smooth, well-worn, nothing like the rock he’s been walking on all day. Animals? Possibly, but he hasn’t even seen any birds flying around.

Could human feet have worn this path down?

 _No._ He will not think of it.

He exhales and starts along the path, keeping one hand pressed to the rock and refusing to look down. He’s not afraid of heights that he knows of, but it’d be an awful time to find out about such a phobia; instead he grits his teeth and limps along as best he can, his body screaming at him for mercy. The path winds its way down and across the spire, arriving at a little plateau full of foliage. When he parts it, he finds what he’s been looking for at last—a small spring, the water clear and inviting. Not that he cares, really. It could be mud and he’d stick his face in it eagerly, which is exactly what he does, kneeling by the side of it and dunking his whole face in to drink like a horse. The water is surprisingly warm, and before he’s even really aware of what he’s doing, he sheds his clothes and submerges himself, closing his eyes and becoming nothing.

 

***

 

He sleeps on the sand of that cave open to the elements, wakes shivering in the night, and manages to find food in the form of some kind of fruit near the spring in the day. That evening he half-buries his body in the sand for lack of blankets, and when he wakes, does it all over again.

He does not think. He doesn’t allow himself to. He just exists.

 

***

 

On the seventh day he can take a deep breath without his rib hurting, which he takes as a sign of progress, and decides to go back down to the shore to see what he can find—if he managed to float to this island, perhaps some of the items aboard _Drachen_ have washed ashore too, and at this point he’ll take any sign of modern civilisation he can get.

Part of the reason he’s keeping himself so numb is so that he can’t admit to himself how out of his element he is. He’s never been in a shipwreck before, never even been close; to be washed up on a deserted island like something out of one of the old tales is unfeasible. The events of that night are a snarled up tangle in his brain, and he knows there’s more to what happened than he can remember, but he doesn’t let himself dwell on it. He doesn’t let himself think of his crew. He _can’t_ , or else he’ll go insane. So he just does what he does to survive, which today involves descending through the tunnel again to walk along the rocky shore.

He spends an age walking back and forth. Most of what he sees is driftwood, useless; he spots a little wooden dinghy buried underneath a pile of nets and gnarled flotsam and jetsam and spends an hour carefully freeing it. It looks seaworthy enough. The wood is swollen and bleached from being stuck in the sea for however long—years, if Hongbin’s estimate is right—but it could do in a pinch. He finds a length of rope and ties the dinghy to a huge lobster cage half-buried in the shallows so it doesn’t float away, and then puts his hands on his hips and considers.

There’s a strangely large amount of debris here, and like many other things on this island, it’s not quite adding up. The sea is a huge place. Hongbin is incredibly lucky to have washed up here at all; more likely he would have floated until his grip loosened on the pallet and he slipped beneath the waters and drowned. But the amount of stuff floating in the water and thrown against the rocks doesn’t make any sense, unless this island is a known danger—which can’t be it either, because Hongbin’s been sailing these waters since before he could walk, and he’s never seen an island like this marked on any chart he’s seen.

So. Either he floated further than he thinks possible, or this island is truly unknown.

He sniffs and turns away from the little dinghy. It’s getting dark, and he can feel he’s sunburnt all over. He hasn’t found much else of use—just a few lengths of rope, which he’s tied around his waist just in case—but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do this again tomorrow. If there’s a dinghy, chances are there’s other useful things to be found, too.

It’s not until he’s nearly back at the base of the spire that he sees it. He turns around to look back over the sea, almost fondly—just because they had a spat the night _Drachen_ went down doesn’t mean he’s not still loyal to her—and spies the piece of the pallet that saved his life, but that’s not what catches his eye. There’s something on the rock next to it, and he blinks at it stupidly, seeing but not comprehending. A… chest?

When he makes his way over to it, that feeling of dread that’s quickly becoming familiar settles over his shoulders, and he can’t shake the feeling he’s being watched even when he turns in a circle and sees, of course, no one. “I’m alone,” he says out loud, and blinks at how scratchy his voice is from being unused for a week. “I am _alone_ ,” he repeats, as if to convince himself.

The chest is reasonably large, coming up to his knee, and seems to be wooden. It’s not anything he recognises, but that doesn’t mean anything. If it’s from _Drachen_ every crew member almost certainly had a chest like this, but he wasn’t the type of captain who made a habit out of going into the crew’s quarters and poking around where it wasn’t his business. There’s no lock. There’s no markings or initials on the lid, either. But the chest isn’t wet. In fact, it’s pristine; for something that has seemingly washed ashore, it’s remarkably well-preserved.

Trying to ignore the way his heart is racing, he kneels in front of it and slides open the latch, half-expecting something horrid to leap out from it when he cracks the lid. But of course nothing does. Instead he finds himself looking at neatly folded knitted fabric, and when he pulls it out, he finds it’s a blanket. It smells faintly like smoke and cooked meat when he buries his face in it and sniffs, and the smell is so strangely familiar and alien that tears spring to his eyes before he can quash them. Underneath the blanket are a few pairs of clothes, linen and cotton pants and shirts, and then underneath those is a knife, a hatchet, a canteen full of water, and a metal tin that contains matches.

He sits back on his haunches, mind reeling. This chest hasn’t saved his life, but it’s made it a thousand times easier, and he knows he should probably be overjoyed but instead he finds he can’t stop shivering and all the hair on his arms is standing up. Could it have washed up? Possibly. But, when he runs his hands over the inside of the box, he finds nothing but smooth treated wood under his hands—for a chest like this to be waterproof, it’d have to have a rubber seal around the inside.

The implication is disturbing, but it’s just another thing he does not allow himself to think of. Instead he spends a few minutes jerry-rigging a makeshift harness for himself using the rope he’s found, figuring he can’t very well carry the chest back up. By the time he’s finished he looks somewhat like a disgruntled—and dishevelled—pack horse, but when he takes a few steps, the chest is pulled along behind him and his lazy knots hold the entire exhausting, painful journey back up to the little cave he’s starting to call home.

 

***

 

The first thing he does the next morning is bathe in the spring, washing his tattered trousers—his shirt had been hanging on by just a few threads after the second day, and so he’d given up on it entirely—and laying them out to dry before he slips into the new clothes from the chest. He nearly cries at the feeling. Clean cotton is not a luxury he took for granted before, but now it’s like he’s the richest man on earth.

He makes his way back to the little cave with dripping wet hair and carves eight lines on the wall with the knife. His rib should only take about six weeks to heal at most. Presuming that no one’s coming for him—and he’s seen no sign of any ships sailing past—that gives him six weeks to either prepare the dinghy for a long journey home or find a bigger boat, preferably one with a sail. He also needs to find another source of food. The fruit is keeping him alive, but he can feel himself growing weaker each day thanks to the lack of variety in his diet, and that won’t do at all. He’s barely explored, but this island seems very unforgiving to the strong and capable, let alone those weakened by injury and malnourishment.

The journey back down to sea level seems to get quicker every time he does it, although going back up is still just as arduous. He quickly gathers the driest driftwood he can find and carves long, thin ribbons of wood off the lid of the chest, hating himself for marring its (abnormally pristine) surface but seeing no other option, and uses this to start a fire. He positions it away from the corner he sleeps in, closest to the open side of the cave, and sits and watches it for a while. The crackling noise is comforting, moreso than the sound of the wind whistling past, and he is loath to move.

He stands up and stretches, running a hand over his chin and grimacing at what he finds. Unlike most every other sailor he knows—bar a few modern types he’s met in passing—he prefers to remain clean-shaven, an extravagance he’s had to forego here. He looks at the knife hopefully, but no. It’s sharp, but not sharp enough to scrape off the week’s worth of stubble, and unless this magical island can somehow produce a straight razor he’ll just have to resign himself to finally growing a beard.

“A razor would be nice,” he says to no one, half expecting one to appear in the sand in front of him.

But of course the island is not magic. Magic does not exist in this world, and everything can be explained by logic: his washing up here, the strange shape of the spires, the worn path, the chest. All of it has a reasonable explanation. He just hasn’t found it yet, and it’s with this thought in his mind that he sighs and turns to head back down again, hatchet stuck in the waistband of his pants.

He doesn’t have a map of the island, and no way to make one (“some paper would be nice too,” he mutters to himself in the long descent through the tunnel, “and ink… and meat… and a beer…”), but by his estimations he explored a good portion of the island’s windward side yesterday. Today he heads to the leeward side, not expecting to find as much junk floating in the water and instead finding a small cove in the shadow of one of the spires.

He freezes. He can’t move, he can’t _make_ himself move. From his vantage point he can see a school of fish swimming lazily about, large enough to eat and plump and well-fed. The cove has been blocked off by rocks piled meticulously to make a tiny wall, enough so the fish are trapped and can’t swim away.

Nature did not do this. Nature could not have done this in any way, shape or form. This is man-made, he’s looking at a manmade structure, and before he knows it his legs give way underneath him and he collapses onto the rock, jarring his rib horribly. This—this is not—all thoughts of a rational explanation fly away, because this has no rational explanation. A human made this fish pen. He has no way of telling how long ago it was, but the sudden knowledge that he may not be alone on the island shoots through him like a gunshot, and he gasps. His heart thuds dully with fear, and before he knows it he has both hands clasped around the handle of the hatchet, holding it to his chest like a lifeline.

It’s nearly an hour before he can make himself move. He slips across the rocks and into the cool water of the cove, stands in the sea as the fish swim around his feet curiously. They’re so tame that all he has to do is reach in and grab one, and to save it suffocating he bludgeons it on the head with the blunt side of the hatchet before heading back to the tunnel. He is moving on autopilot, reeling and in complete shock, but he does not let go of the hatchet the whole time he is walking.

 

***

 

He cooks the fish over the fire and eats it with his fingers, and it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted. He doesn’t even feel guilty that he eats it all in one sitting; after a week of fruit, he feels like he deserves a treat. The feeling of being watched does not abate, even when he sits with his back against the wall, even with the hatchet in his lap and the knife in his waistband. He’s alone, or he may not be, or he may be, or—

“I need to get off this island,” he whispers to himself, watching the sky darken and ignoring the shivers starting to set in.

 

***

 

After the meal of fish he figures he’s earned a day off, especially since his rib is playing up, and so he sits with his feet dangling over the edge of the cliff in his cave and he whittles.

He’s never been very good at it, not like his father, who used to carve little sculptures for Hongbin and his mother—dolphins and sharks and fish and mermaids, all carved with a sense of slight whimsy and made all the more earnest by the rough-hewn finish of them. But he’s bored and the one thing he does have an abundance of on this cursed island is driftwood, and so he sits and he watches and he carves absentmindedly, hands moving of their own accord. When he’s finished it’s mid-morning and the sun is shining in his eyes, warming him, which means that the chill that settles over his skin when he looks down at what he’s carved is unnatural.

It’s the spires of the island.

He nearly drops the carving, saved only at the last moment by the knowledge that it will fall and be obliterated on the rocks below. Instead he holds it close to his chest and starts running, more out of frustration than anything else; if this island is so determined to get under his skin he’ll make this a voodoo doll, fling it into the sea and hope the island follows. The tunnel is harder to navigate as he sprints, but he’s gotten used to the feel of it now and he knows when it dips, when it loops around, when it levels out—and the thought frightens him. He is too used to this place.

He runs to the rocks where he washed up and turns around to look. For whatever reason the spires are lit by the sun behind him, lit in a way he hasn’t seen them before, and when it clicks as to what he’s looking at he wants to throw up. No, no, no—

It’s a skull.

The vaguely reptilian skull of a creature he’s never seen before, which is why he hasn’t been able to recognise it—oh, _god_. The structure he thought an arch is its lower jaw, the strange horizontal spikes its teeth; it looks like the creature died with its head sticking straight up in the air. When he turns and looks at the rocks behind him, he can see that the odd curves hanging over the sea, stretching out for a mile—it’s the creature’s spine, its ribs, and before he knows it he’s bending over and emptying the contents of his stomach. This is a hallucination. It must be. There is no way this can be real, he can’t be stuck on this cursed island of bones—

He’s moving before his brain can catch up. He sprints over the shore, leaping over rock pools and slipping on algae. He drops into the water and unties the dingy with shaking hands. He isn’t even really aware of the fact that he has no provisions, nothing except the clothes on his back, the knife, and his wood carving; he’s blind to everything except the panic. It overtakes him and narrows his vision, _runrunrunrun_ beating through his veins, _have to go have to get out of here_. The sea is a friend. He knows her well. She will take care of him, dinghy or no; he knows that much. Moving quickly, he pushes the dinghy away from the rocks feverishly and hops in, taking up the oars and rowing with no regard for his rib.

He does not get very far. In fact, he’s barely left the little cove when the sea, previously as calm and as flat as a lagoon, starts to pick up chop. Even that does not slow him. Nothing does, not even as the chop turns into whitecaps; he rows and he rows and when he comes to his senses he realises the sea has turned into a monster around him and the dinghy is now facing twenty-foot waves that have come from nowhere. Flashes of _Drachen_ run through his brain, his own voice calling out _abandon ship_ , and the last thing he sees before a wave swamps the tiny dinghy is the spires of the cursed island, rising from the sea like something out of a nightmare.

 

***

 

Waves—panic—his rib—he breaks to the surface and splutters for air before slipping beneath once more. There is no pallet to save him this time. The dinghy is capsized, and he swims for it only for it to be swept away in front of his eyes; he sees it rise up the crest of a wave, and then it is gone.

He gives up and slips below into the sea’s waiting arms.

 

***

 

He does not feel it, but a hand closes around his collar and drags him to the surface. He is pulled through the sea—now calm and placid once more—and deposited on the shore he first washed up on.

When he opens his eyes and sees the spires in front of him, he starts crying and cannot stop.

 

***

 

His unscheduled adventure took more out of him than he thought possible. It takes him hours to climb up to his cave, and when he gets there he wraps himself in his blanket and lies down, willing the chills to stop. Every breath sends pain stabbing through him, and he revels in it, for it’s what he deserves; even if there are things that are yet to be explained about the situation—like how the sea turned on him so fast—he should have known better. The knife and his carving, and the dinghy, are lost forever. Unless he is lucky enough to find another boat, he’s trapped here forever.

It doesn’t add up. None of it makes the slightest bit of _sense_. The shape of the island, the way the sea had changed, the touches of human habitation—he is a man of logic (unusual amongst his peers, given sailors are some of the most taken to mysticism) and there is no logic to be found, not here. The world does not work as it should, and he is left adrift in the wake of that knowledge.

It doesn’t escape his mind, either, that he’s currently lying in the skull of what was once presumably a living creature.

He is completely and utterly out of his element.

 

***

 

For the next few days he rests, sorting through his thoughts and not even venturing down to the surface for fish.

He still has the hatchet. He has the blanket, the canteen, the clothes (both the other pairs that were in the chest and his torn pants). He has the chest itself. He has a lot of driftwood, and a lot of rope. He has the fish in their pen, the fruit in the trees, and the spring.

He doesn’t have a boat. He doesn’t have a map. He doesn’t have an explanation for any of this nonsense. He has no plan. No one is looking for him. He is alone (presumably).

In the face of it all, he should feel helpless. Instead he just feels numb. His goal is to get off the island, and to do that he needs to figure out how; he can possibly build a rudimentary boat, but if the sea changes again, it won’t last long. He needs a decent sized boat, preferably one with a sail. He needs to get up and start looking. Instead he can do nothing but lie wrapped in his blanket and shiver. Thoughts of _Drachen_ are plaguing him, guilt hammering into him finally—nearly two weeks later, as if his brain had to sort through everything that happened—and he doesn’t know what to do with everything assaulting him at once.

He starts hobbling down to the shore again not out of necessity but out of desperation; by keeping his feet and hands busy, he keeps his mind busy, too. He gathers all the rope he can find, whether it be new and still good or old and rotting. He finds more flotsam and jetsam washed up, and starts sorting through it slowly and categorically based on its usefulness to him.

He exists, because he can do nothing less.

 

***

 

_“Captain!” his chief mate screams at him._

_The list has reached thirty-five degrees at least—Hongbin is standing with one foot on the wall and one on the floor, holding on for dear life, eyes darting back and forth between his chief mate in the doorway and the last of the crew jumping one-by-one into the lifeboat off to port. “Go,” he tells her, and when she doesn’t reply, yells. “I ordered abandon ship—go!”_

_But going is no easy task when the ship is leaning so far to port. He watches her begin to pick her way across the deck, clinging on to every handhold she can find. The orange of her life vest provides an easy beacon to draw Hongbin’s eye, which is how he sees her lose her grip and fall into the sea, tumbling head over heels._

_The walkie-talkie crackles. “Captain—”_

_“Cast off and get her,” Hongbin replies._

_“But we still need to pick you up—”_

_“I’ll jump. Just go.”_

_He tightens the straps on his life vest and prepares to make his own perilous journey across the deck, watching as the lifeboat pushes away from_ Drachen _, making its way over to the orange vest bobbing in the ocean. It’s a perilous task; at any moment they could be slammed into_ Drachen _once more, and the size of the waves are far too much for the little lifeboat to contend with. But they have no other option._

_Hongbin has damned them all._

 

***

 

It’s a week after his attempt to escape before his rib is doing well enough for him to walk without pain, and he’s well and truly sick of picking his way over the rocky shore. Instead he decides to head down to the cave he found on his first day here.  He has no doubt that there are a whole network of caves and tunnels dotted throughout the whole spire, and wants to see if the (presumably) previous inhabitant has left anything useful.

Just like last time, the large cavern is oppressive. It doesn’t instil quite the same panic as it did before, but he still has to remind himself to breathe, to doggedly keep moving forward even as his instincts are telling him to turn and run. He can’t tell if it’s the cavern itself or just him—he’s a man of the ocean, made to stand on the deck of a ship and feel the sea wind on his face, not be trapped underground in the belly of the earth. The knowledge that this was undoubtedly some awful monstrous creature, that he’s poking around in its skull, does not help either.

He comes upon the altar a ways inside the cavern, far enough away from the entrance that he can’t hear the sea anymore. An altar is a strange word, but it’s the only one he has to describe what he’s looking at: a flat piece of stone that comes up to his hip, charred and blackened around the edges and with a strange dip in the centre of it. He touches the edge of it hesitantly, and his hand comes away black with ash; he rubs it between his fingers and considers, trying to ignore the way his heart is racing out of fear. This is another man-made structure, he is sure of it. He has no way of telling how long ago it was used, but the fact that there’s ash remaining on it is enough to have him backing away slowly and heading deeper into the cavern.

 _You do not belong, you do not belong, you do not belong,_ his heart tells him. _Get out get out get out._ He knows that there is something dreadfully wrong with this island. That much is clear by now. He just doesn’t know what—and his faith in logic has been shaken thoroughly by all that he has seen and all that he simply does not have answers for. It’s not like he considers himself a genius, but after years at sea he’s seen it all.

This, though? This island is an utter mystery.

The cavern peters out into a crevice in the rock, wide enough for Hongbin to walk into comfortably. He can’t see any light on the other side, and soon finds that the further he goes in the narrower it becomes and, not wanting to be trapped, starts backing out. Absentmindedly he trails a hand over the rock wall as he goes, not expecting to feel yet more ash—but there it is, his fingers are dirty and blackened, and he hurries free of the crevice and backtracks into the first tunnel he finds.

Keeping his mind empty is harder than it was when he first arrived. He tries to think of nothing as he walks, one hand on the wall, but thoughts slip through like water: the groaning noise _Drachen_ had made as she sunk, like a dying animal; the feel of the ocean in his lungs; the skull of the island-creature rising from the sea; the ash on his fingers; the little pen of fish— _wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong_ , there’s something fiercely, fundamentally wrong with this island, and he wants nothing more than to sail away from here and be free of its grasp forever.

The tunnel slopes downward, and he walks warily as the floor turns from dry to damp. It’s low tide right now, but if the waterline marked on the wall and the sound of the ocean are any indication, this tunnel floods at high tide. He has survived enough drownings for one lifetime and so is ready to turn back at any second lest the tide turns suddenly, but as it turns out, he has no need. The tunnel abruptly opens into another cave, this one spilling open to the rocks outside—he can hear the sea washing against land and see the spray—and filled with _stuff_. He freezes out of surprise more than anything else, hand falling to the hatchet tucked into his pants. Wood, chests, buoys, fabric and rope and seaweed—and in the middle of it all a twenty-five-foot sailboat leaning on its keel, mast intact but mainsail still out and horribly torn. Not that Hongbin particularly cares. He darts over to it, running a hand over its hull, hope bubbling up his throat. This boat is big enough for the journey home. Nevermind that the hull has holes in it, the wood rotted through. Nevermind that it’s been sitting here for decades by the looks of it. He’s so overjoyed he nearly kisses it and only catches himself at the last second. If he can repair the sail and the hull (which is not an easy a task as it sounds), he stands a good chance at leaving here after all.

He doesn’t stay for long. The tide is threatening, after all. Instead he lashes the ship down to every heavy metal object he can find, figuring that’ll do since it hasn’t managed to float free so far, and disappears back down the tunnel just as water is starting to pour in the cave opening. There’s enough stuff in there to keep him occupied for a while, at least, and even though he knows he shouldn’t put the cart before the horse, he’s grinning as he heads back up to his cave.

 

***

 

Instead of doing the logical thing—which would be go through the cave systematically to see what other useful objects he can find, like he’s done all along the shore—he does the impatient thing, and decides to try and fix the sails first.

The actual repairing should be relatively simple. Even though he’s been sailing large merchant ships for the past few years, he grew up on yachts, and spent many an evening sewing sails with his father. To free the mainsail he has to first pull away the debris heaped on it, only managing to do so with a rudimentary pulley and lever system that’s less actual pulleys and more him hauling wood about with ropes. Only after that’s done can he shimmy up the mast (thankfully the boat has settled to where the mast is leaning over a small rock platform, making his job easier) and untie the rotting ropes until the sail falls, defeated, onto the deck. The jib is easier; he merely has to unfurl it from around the forestay. It sounds like a simple process but takes him three days, and by the time he has dragged the fabric all the way up to his cave, he swears he’s re-injured his rib.

The mainsail is enormous. It seems to be in decent shape apart from the tears—it’s an older type of sail, made of flax canvas rather than modern materials and dyed a deep crimson. The tears are numerous and quite serious, but fixable with the right kind of needle and thread. The jib has fared better, possibly because it was furled when the ship wrecked, but appears to have been chewed at by a rather enthusiastic rat so the bottom edge is frayed. It’s all fixable, but not without a needle and thread, and so with a sigh he gets up from the sand—slowly, wincing at his rib—and heads back down the tunnel, leaning heavily on a piece of driftwood he’s using as a makeshift cane.

The amount of stuff in the cave makes his task almost overwhelming, and so he picks a wooden box at random and heaves the lid off. Inside is crockery, most of it shattered; he digs about and finds a plate and a cup, chipped but still useable, and sets them aside. Foolish? Perhaps. But he knows that the best way to keep yourself sane is to try and keep the familiar with you at all times—it’s why he always decorated his quarters with some little touches of home no matter what ship he was on, and it’s why he intends to take the cup and plate back up to his cave. His sanity, along with his strength, is the only thing he can rely on now; if either of those leave him, he is lost. The island is testing him, but he is determined not to let it win. He _will_ escape.

He searches as best he can until the tide changes, and then makes his way out with a box cradled in his arms. He hasn’t found needle and thread, but the search wasn’t entirely fruitless; along with the cup and plate, he found some sheets, another knife, reams of faded paper that he thinks might be maps, and a silver handheld compass in beautiful condition.

“Progress,” he mutters to himself as he huffs and puffs his way back up the tunnel that he knows so well now. “Progress.”

 _Drachen_ , the altar, the ash, the shivers he gets down his spine for no reason at all, the fish pen—he does not think of it. He refuses to. He cannot. He _will_ escape.

He has to.

 

***

 

Drachen _heaves beneath his feet as he pauses for a moment to survey the situation, and almost wishes he could just close his eyes instead. The situation is grim, grimmer than he thought possible, and the knowledge that it is all his fault is weighing on him heavily even as his mind races. The list has reached forty-five degrees by now, at least; if_ Drachen _keeps going like this she will keel over entirely, if the waves do not tear her apart before then. The hull is screaming, metal making sounds it was never designed to make as it withstands pressures it was never meant to withstand—the waves are enormous, thirty-footers slamming into the ship at an interval of every fifteen seconds._

_Time is precious. He only has a few minutes left before the list reaches a point where he won’t be able to walk on the deck—as it is, when he steps out of the bridge he nearly falls, saved only by grabbing a hand-hold and hanging on for dear life. From out here the wind drives the rain directly into his face, and peering through the gloom he can just barely see the little lifeboat, still upright and battling the waves, having picked up the chief mate as ordered._

_He does not know how he does it, but slowly, painstakingly, he picks his way across the deck, finally reaching where the water is rushing over the side of_ Drachen _. The lifeboat is as close as it dares to get, but he’ll still have to jump into the sea and swim for it, and takes a second to brace himself._

 _As it turns out, he does not have a second. A wave rises from off the starboard bow and slams into_ Drachen _. Given how she’s heeled over so far to port, the wave hits the exposed hull at full speed and with a horrible moan and a shudder, vibrating terribly beneath Hongbin’s feet,_ MV Drachen _splits apart and Hongbin is pitched into the ocean._

 

***

 

He wakes to thunder and cannot breathe—all he can see are waves higher than his head, feel the cold of the sea surrounding him, the rain biting at his face, his arms. As it turns out, when he opens his eyes and reaches for the hatchet out of panic, he is not reliving that horrible day on _Drachen_ at all. Instead a storm has fallen over the island, sending rain streaming into his cave, and he curses and drags his blanket away. It’s a pointless task. Given that the cave is entirely open to the elements on one side and has a doorway leading out to the spring on the other, he’s getting pelted from all sides and everything is getting soaked—his fire has gone out and is smoking, the fish he was going to eat for breakfast ruined. It’s not until he sees the swathes of sail laid out on the ground that he gets an idea, and, shivering, darts down the tunnel in search of driftwood.

He doesn’t have to go far. In anticipation of restocking the fire, he’s started a little stockpile of wood in one of the bigger curves of the tunnel. Most of it is too short for his idea, but he grabs the longest pieces and heads back up to his cave again, nearly slipping on the wet rock and catching himself at the last moment.

“ _Fucking_ rib,” he hisses, feeling pain run through him.

It takes him an age, and a lot of swearing, but somehow, eventually, he manages. By the time he’s finished he’s crouched under the mainsail, which he’s stretched across the driftwood—anchored by rocks and sand—to make a kind of lean-to. It’s shoddy, and he doubts it will stay up for very long, and there’s water dripping in through the tears, but for the most part he’s not being lashed by wind and rain and so he feels strangely proud of himself. Before he knows it, and without reason to, he starts laughing. The sound ricochets around the little cave, making it sound like he’s not alone, and that just makes him laugh even harder.

Here he is, dressed in rags and with a hideous beard, hair tangled in knots and feet permanently dirty from walking around the rocks—here he is, the disheveled wreck that the island has made him, laughing without a care in the world.

He is not broken, not yet.

 

***

 

The storm has passed when he wakes again in the mid-morning, and he gladly dismantles the lean-to and lays the sail out on the sand to dry. The cave is calling him, so he tucks his newfound knife into his pants—he’d missed the feel of having one there, and the hatchet was slightly unwieldy—and grabs some fruit for breakfast before heading down the spire. His steps are light and he’s humming under his breath despite himself; for the first time since he washed up on this godforsaken place, he has hope, so tangible he can almost reach out and touch it. So long as he can repair the hull of the sailboat and sew up the sails, he has a good chance of surviving and escaping.

His plan for the day is to keep looking for a needle and thread (aware, of course, that he’s quite literally looking for a needle in a haystack) but he isn’t too concerned if he can’t find one. When he went to grab a fish last night, he’d spied some oysters on the rocks of the fish pen; he figures that in a worst-case scenario he can whittle down an oyster shell into something approximating a needle, and that it’ll be sharp enough to do the job. The thread is another problem, but if he needs to he can pull apart the sheets he found last night to get at the cotton. It would be less than ideal, but the longer he spends on this island the more fervent his desire to leave grows.

The tide is low once more, but the ship has shifted slightly when it rose with the water and came back down again. It probably has something to do with the lack of weight without the sails on board, but what it means for Hongbin is that it’s settled onto its starboard, rather than its port, making the entrance to belowdeck very apparent the moment he pauses in the mouth of the tunnel.

It’s a challenge to get up on the deck. It takes a while, but he manages by crawling back onto the same rocks he used to climb up the mast and then attempting to leap across. He manages to grab the edge of the railing with a grunt, feels his rib twinge as he pulls himself up and over, and then he’s standing on the deck of the boat that is to be his saviour.

The wood is steady, albeit slanted, beneath his feet as he makes his way over to the door leading to belowdeck. He is prepared for it to be jammed shut, but instead it opens easily—albeit with a squeak—and he hesitates for a moment. The cave isn’t particularly bright in the first place, but this doorway is pitch black, no light shining through the portholes. If this had been his first day on the island, he would have told himself that there was no way that anything living was inside… but now he knows better, and he lets his eyes adjust to the darkness.

As it turns out, it was paranoia on his part. Nothing jumps out at him, and when he goes down the short companionway he can just make out through the gloom a perfectly ordinary, if a little cramped, cabin. There’s a single bed set against the hull to his right, and the area he’s standing in doubles as the galley and mess room, he supposes, although the table is covered with paper instead of cups and plates. The entire interior is dank and damp, wood stained and surfaces ruined by the remnants of the water that must flood inside every time the tide rises. There’s about an inch or so of cold water pooled around his feet now, and he can’t stop shivering at the eerie sensation of being in the belly of a ship once more. _Drachen_ was nearly seven and a half hundred feet long, metal and imposing, but this little pleasure yacht is the opposite—merely twenty-five feet in length, wood and quaint-coloured sails, agile and nimble. And yet he can’t help the way his chest tightens in a way that has nothing to do with his rib, and he turns and makes his way out of the cabin, doubling over once he’s on the deck again.

 _Breathe_. Breathe. That’s all he can do. The darkness is not his enemy; this ship is not his enemy. But it’s with more enthusiasm than he can probably afford that he jumps from the deck to the sandy cave bottom below, landing in a crouch before hurrying down the tunnel again. With every step he takes away from the cave, the icy fingers of dread slide away, and he hates himself for being afraid of absolutely nothing at all.

Maybe this hateful island has already gotten to him, and he really has gone insane.

 

***

 

He returns to the cave with a makeshift torch that he’d constructed by wrapping strips of cotton around a thick piece of driftwood. It probably won’t burn for very long, but that’s alright; as he’s assembling it in his cave, he watches the tide begin to turn. He’ll give himself just long enough to poke around the cabin as best he can, and then he’ll leave the cave to fill with water and find something else to keep his hands busy. He’s trying not to think of how he’ll get the boat _out_ of the cave once it’s repaired, either, because the task is so monumental it terrifies him whenever he thinks of it. In fact, if he pays attention to everything he must do to be able to sail away from here, he becomes so overwhelmed he finds he wants to lie in the sand and let the elements take him. The thought frightens him terribly, and he shivers.

In the flickering light of the torch, the cave isn’t as spooky as it first appeared, and emboldened he picks his way over to the stern of the boat, wanting to at least know her name if she is to save his life at some point in the future.

 _Escape_ , he reads, and can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.

Getting onto _Escape_ ’s deck is easier this time, and he hurries below with torch in hand, hyper-aware of how loud and close the sea is. The little cabin is transformed into something almost homely, and he finds a place to wedge the torch to keep it upright—figuring that if it falls it’ll just fall into the water and go out—and starts looking.

He goes through all the cupboards first, because he’s itching to look at the papers on the table and knows that if he does he’ll forget about everything else. There’s nothing of interest in the first few he opens, just broken crockery, and it’s not until the fourth cupboard that he finds the first jackpot of the day—canned food, and plenty of it. He falls on it with the hunger of a man who hasn’t eaten anything but fish and fruit in three weeks, yanking off the lid of a can of beans and pouring it directly into his mouth. He’s not even the biggest fan of canned beans (who is?) but it tastes like heaven, and he moans as he chews, sagging onto the countertop. There’s more cans in there and he pulls them all out and puts them on the table, cracking open another can of beans to eat as he goes.

Buried under lifejackets in the cupboard closest to the bow, he finds what he’s looking for. It’s a nondescript cloth bag, and at first he thinks it’s an emergency beacon of some sort—but when he pulls it open he whimpers, out of relief or excitement he’s not really sure.

It’s a sail repair kit.

Needles, thread, bobbin, tape, even a sailmaker’s palm—this is more than he bargained for, more than he ever could have hoped for, and he puts it carefully on the table next to the cans and looks over his prizes with an enormous grin on his face. All that’s left is to go through the papers, but even if they are worthless, he’s already gained so much that he can’t really dare to hope for more.

His luck doesn’t run out, however. The papers are maps and charts, and the moment he picks up the first one his eyes widen—these are waters he knows, waters he’s been sailing for as long as he can remember. Sliding into the booth behind the table, he spreads the map back out on the table and begins to search. If he’s right—if his hunch is correct—if for once in his miserable life something goes well—he’s closer to home than he thought, and the journey away from here doesn’t seem so perilous after all.

He spends so long poring over the charts and maps that he loses track of time. The torch burns for longer than he anticipated, and because its light does not die, he doesn’t look up. He doesn’t hear the water begin to pour into the cave. He doesn’t even hear it lap against the side of the boat, and he certainly doesn’t hear it begin to trickle into the cabin through the holes in the hull. The only time he notices something is amiss is when everything shifts violently underneath his feet and he goes sprawling to the floor, heart in his throat—and he knows instantly what has happened.

 _Escape_ is no longer resting on the sandy floor on her keel; she’s floating. The cave is flooded. He is trapped.

He scrambles out from behind the desk and up the stairs and is horrified at what he sees. _Escape_ is floating in about four feet of water, if his estimates are correct. The panic is racing through his veins, choking him—he can’t breathe, every breath he takes is ragged and hurts his rib, and his world narrows down to the tunnel on the far side of the cave.

If he took a moment to think, he would realise that _Escape_ ’s deck is the safest place to be. She’s not able to go anywhere seeing as he’d lashed her down when he first found her, and although it would be irritating to wait six hours for the tide to turn, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But the last time he took a moment to think is when _Drachen_ split apart underneath him, and spurred on by pure fear, nothing else, he drops from _Escape_ ’s bow into the water and strikes out for the tunnel.

He doesn’t even hesitate in its mouth. He just plunges in, swimming in water deeper than he realised, heartbeat so loud it’s all he can hear. All he can focus on is getting free, getting away from the sea; he doesn’t remember that the tunnel slopes downward, is too panicked to notice the roof of the tunnel disappearing into the water in front of him, and then he is trapped.

Treading water, he gasps, looking around as if he can see answers. But the tide is still rising. He can either go back—and to his brain, slowly shutting down entirely, that is not an option—or go forward, and so he takes a deep breath and dives beneath.

He navigates blindly, swimming forward and trying to keep one hand on the wall so he doesn’t get turned around. But getting turned around is the least of his problems. Adrenaline is rushing through his system, his heart is racing and burning through oxygen, and the moment he realises he’s trapped under tons of skeletal rock is the moment he also realises he’s run out of air, and he stops swimming, muscles freezing and refusing to work.

 _No_ , he thinks as he sinks, opening his mouth to scream and getting nothing but seawater instead. He wouldn’t mind drowning in the open sea, but not under here, not like this; the thought of being trapped in these caves forever is too much to bear. The island has claimed him finally, as he feared she would, and as his world slows down to the _thud-thud_ of his heart in his ears, he is grabbed by the wrist and pulled forward violently.

 _What the fuck?_ He doesn’t have time to react because then he’s being yanked upwards and he erupts into the air and gasps, oxygen never tasting this good even if it’s just the stale air of the tunnel. When he wipes his eyes, he sees a man treading water in front of him, a man with hair plastered to his face, a man with pretty features, a man Hongbin has never seen before in his life and he knows, instantly and deeply, that something has changed and can never be the same.

He doesn’t even have time to feel relief at the fact that at last the mystery is solved, that he knows who built the fish pen and left him the chest. All he feels is a sudden spike of confusion, before, with no warning and no fanfare, he blacks out.

 

***

 

 _Wind, waves, rain—his entire world is a maelstrom of chaos, and he is lost in it, tumbling head over heels and being dragged to the surface by the buoyancy of his life vest. What he sees when he surfaces, however, makes him gasp._ Drachen _is rolling helplessly on the waves, impossibly huge in front of him and split in two, her bow section sinking beneath as her stern still stubbornly floats above._

_“Captain!”_

_A yell makes him focus, and he can just make out the lifeboat making its way over to him, the second mate waving furiously. Or they’re trying to, at least._ Drachen _’s corpse is acting as a wind shadow, sparing them the worst of the waves, but what makes it past is still enormous. This is a storm no ship should be out at sea in. That was Hongbin’s final mistake._

_He strikes out for the lifeboat, intending to meet them halfway and save them the journey. He doesn’t even make it a few meters before a wave, moving slowly and menacingly like a predator, catches the lifeboat at the wrong angle. It swamps and rocks and every single person aboard is thrown into the water, scattering, Hongbin suddenly surrounded by thrashing orange vests._

_The lifeboat has not capsized. That’s the most important thing—not that it really matters in this weather, honestly. It’s not enclosed, and chances are high that this is merely the first of many times it will get battered by the sea. Hongbin reaches its bow and pulls himself aboard, busying himself with throwing out lines to the crew paddling towards him. His hands are numb and his teeth are chattering, but it has nothing to do with the temperature—the sea is thankfully quite warm at this time of year._

_Human beings tend to react two ways in times of strife: they panic, or they cope. Most of his crew seems to be the coping type, soundlessly helping pull everyone on board as they reach the lifeboat. The third mate, however, panics. His eyes are wild and rabid, and he takes Hongbin’s outstretched hand and pulls him under—anything to get him closer to the illusion of safety that the lifeboat offers._

_It all happens very quickly after that._

_The strap of Hongbin’s life vest gives way. Perhaps this particular life vest is old; perhaps he’s worn the threads when he was pulling everyone aboard. The reason is irrelevant. The life vest gives way and slips off and this time he is not yanked to the surface but has to swim there himself, and what he sees terrifies him. Pulled by waves, the lifeboat is already tens of meters away from him. His life vest is nowhere to be seen._ Drachen _’s bow is gone, her stern going under, and he grabs and clings onto a piece of flotsam floating by—wood, a piece of a pallet, although from where he has no idea. He grabs it and he holds onto it until he can feel splinters digging into his hands, and as he’s whipped by rain and wind and the cruel, cruel sea, he watches his ship sink and feels his hope sink with her._

_The lifeboat disappears behind waves too big to comprehend. He is alone, and he knows he will die._

 

***

 

He wakes when the stranger is carrying him.

Instincts tell him not to move, and so he forces himself to remain limp and to keep his breathing even. The stranger has him slung over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, meaning Hongbin can’t see his face. They’re in one of the tunnels on the island—he’d recognise that strange-coloured rock anywhere—and they’re heading uphill.

Breathe. Focus. Compartmentalise.

He can still feel the knife in his waistband, for which he is unbelievably thankful; to lose one knife and nearly drown is an accident, but for it to happen again is stupidity. Perhaps he should stop carrying knives. Maybe they’re a bad omen. The thought makes him want to laugh, and suppressing it when the stranger’s shoulder is digging into his abdomen is almost painful. No—think—he is not out of danger yet, and bites his lip to focus.

What does he know? He nearly drowned—again. This stranger saved his life, for reasons unknown. He must be the one who built the fish pen and who placed the chest so conveniently for Hongbin to find. That indicates he has good intentions, but Hongbin is not about to let his guard down; he is alone on a hostile island with a stranger, and more than anything he is just tired of nearly dying. He certainly isn’t about to let himself get murdered.

The stranger stops and Hongbin closes his eyes again. There’s the shuffling of feet, and then the stranger kneels and places Hongbin on the ground gently. He tries to go as limp as he can and let his body loll as if he was still unconscious, ending up splayed at an awkward angle, but the stranger arranges his limbs and props him up, touches strangely careful.

He’s lying on sand and he can feel a gentle breeze on his face—somewhere high up in the spire, probably. The urge to open his eyes is nearly unbearable, but he keeps his breathing even and eyelids shut and waits. For a minute or so there’s no noise at all and he can’t tell where the stranger is. Then more footsteps, moving away, and Hongbin can’t bear it any longer and opens his eyes.

He’s lying propped up against a rock. To his left is the sky and the sea, a path leading down the spire; to his right is a mass of wood and fabric that doesn’t make sense. Directly in front of him, though, crouching, is a man. Or at least the back of a man. He’s shirtless, wearing plain black cotton pants and no shoes, and his skin has the golden glow of a tan indicative of someone who spends a lot of time in the sun. From here Hongbin can’t see his face, but he can remember it from the tunnel just fine; small lips, cat-like eyes, high cheekbones and striking black hair.

Slowly and soundlessly Hongbin gets to his feet, grabbing the knife and holding it out in front of him warily. “Who the _hell_ are you?”

The man whirls. There’s something off about how he moves; it’s jerky and almost uncontrolled. His eyes are wild, with fear or some other emotion Hongbin has no hope of identifying, and when he spots the knife he crouches defensively and puts both hands up, placating. “I—” he starts, and then blinks, as if the sound of his own voice has startled him. “I live here.”

“What’s your name?”

“Taekwoon.” This he says quietly, and it’s only now that Hongbin realises he has a faint accent. “My name is Taekwoon.” He gets to his feet and Hongbin realises they’re just about the same height. “What is yours?”

Hongbin regards him for a long moment, evaluating. For a second he thinks to give a fake name, but—no. Pointless. “I’m Hongbin.” He lowers the knife fractionally. It doesn’t seem genteel to threaten someone once you’re on first-name basis with them—not that he’s really used to threatening anyone. He has so many questions he doesn’t even really know where to begin, but starts with something easy. “How did you get here?”

At this Taekwoon blinks, and Hongbin can see the wheels turning in his head. “I…” he says, and looks out towards the sea. “My ship… I was shipwrecked. I washed up here… three years ago.”

He has a strange affectation about his words, like he’s not used to speaking. If he really has been here for three years, that’s no surprise; Hongbin’s own voice is scratchy after being mostly unused for three weeks. But still he does not lower the knife entirely. “And you’ve lived here since? Why haven’t you tried to escape?”

“I—I did not know how to. I do not know how to sail,” Taekwoon stutters, and when Hongbin narrows his eyes, he raises his hands higher. “I was a—a passenger on the ship.”

It’s an explanation that makes sense, at least on paper, but Hongbin’s still not convinced. He does not lower the knife. “Why did you save my life? Why have you been hiding all this time? I thought I was going insane—I thought this island was cursed, for God’s sake.”

“I was scared,” Taekwoon whispers, and it’s here that Hongbin can see his hands are trembling in the air. “I did not know if you would be friendly or… hostile. I have been by myself for so long that I—I did not know what to do. So I tried to help you from afar.”

It’s here that Hongbin finally lowers the knife, tucking it back into the waistband of his pants. Taekwoon looks instantly relieved, and some part of Hongbin feels a little guilty—but no, he’s just concerned for his own safety, he needn’t (and won’t) feel guilty over that. This island has tested him enough, and he’s still not entirely convinced that this just isn’t a horrific hallucination, that he’s really cracked and lost it and is now dreaming up friends for himself. But Taekwoon looks real enough, and he certainly felt real enough when he was carrying Hongbin. So, not a hallucination then.

Which is almost worse, in a way.

“What do we do now?” he asks, and the moment the words leave his mouth he realises that, now he’s not distracted by possible danger, he can no longer ignore the way his rib is killing him. When Taekwoon doesn’t answer straight away, he looks around the part of the spire they’re in. “Is this where you… sleep?”

It’s a three-sided cave much bigger than his. The thing that Taekwoon had been crouching over is a fire and the messy tangle of wood and fabric, when Hongbin looks closer, is the shattered remnants of another boat. How on earth did a boat get all the way up here? If he had to guess they’re higher than where his cave is, way up in the air—there is no way a ship could have sailed into these rocks, not like this. The wood is rotten and the sail little more than strips of fabric now, and the shape of it isn’t something he’s seen in person before, just in books—it’s an ancient style of sailboat, and he wonders how long it’s been there.

More importantly, though, is the fact that there’s very little sign of habitation. Hongbin’s little cave has more sign of life than this; he has seventeen notches on the wall and crap spread everywhere. By comparison, in this cave there’s a single blanket by the fire, two chests against the old sailboat, and nothing else.

“Yes,” Taekwoon replies, making his way around the fire so he can tend to it and keep an eye on Hongbin at the same time. Smart. He’s as wary as Hongbin is. “This is my cave.”

The view is spectacular this high up, especially as the sun is just beginning to set. Hongbin is lost, if he’s honest. Being alone on the island was easy; now he has company, things are infinitely more complicated. “Well,” he says, and takes a big breath in in preparation to shake Taekwoon’s hand and say his goodbyes—but pain spears through him and he grunts and folds at the waist. “Shit.”

“What is it?” Taekwoon’s instantly in front of him, putting both hands on Hongbin’s shoulders and gently but firmly guiding him back down against the rock once more. “Where does it hurt?”

In lieu of a reply, Hongbin just pulls up his shirt. Taekwoon spots the massive mottled bruise there—no doubt blooming once more after all that’s happened, a fact confirmed when Hongbin looks down at it—and winces, backing away slightly. “I think it happened when my ship sank… or on the way here. Or something. But it’s not been getting better.”

At this, Taekwoon snorts, turning away to open one of the chests and dig through it. “I’m not surprised, after all the things you have been doing,” he mumbles under his breath.

“Have you been _watching_ me?”

“Of course,” Taekwoon says frankly, pulling out a roll of bandage and shutting the chest once more. “I watch the sea. I watch the sky, and the birds. Why would I not watch you?”

All those times Hongbin felt eyes on him and dismissed it as paranoia—he was right after all, and glares up at Taekwoon. He’s strange, stranger than Hongbin thinks is normal for someone who has been alone for three years, and there’s something playing in the back of his mind, some instinct keeping him on edge. _Something’s not right_ , it says. _Stay on your guard._

“Right,” he deadpans, and holds out a hand for the bandage. “Is that for me?”

Wordlessly, Taekwoon drops it onto his palm, and equally as wordlessly Hongbin pulls off his shirt and begins winding the bandage around his chest. He doubts it will help much, but it’s yet another kind gesture from Taekwoon, and so he takes what is offered. If he keeps re-injuring his rib, he may not get out of here within a month. He wants to finish the repairs on _Escape_ by then.

Thinking of _Escape_ just reminds him of the tunnel, and the sensation of being surrounded by water fills him once more and he stops what he’s doing to breathe. Surely, _surely_ , after three times nearly drowning—surely the sea has had enough of him by now? He looks out at the view below, the aquamarine sea looking just as calm and inviting as ever, and for the first time in his life feels fear at the thought of being near her once more.

This island is changing him, and he doesn’t like it one bit.

“Why did you save me?” he asks, resuming bandaging his ribs and forcing himself to look at Taekwoon kneeling by the fire.

If Taekwoon sees this for what it is—a distraction technique to stave off an oncoming panic attack—he doesn’t give it away. Instead he just blinks, the question seemingly having caught him off guard. “I—I could not just leave you there. That would be murder.”

“More akin to manslaughter, probably,” Hongbin mutters, which just makes Taekwoon screw up his face in confusion. He’s not stupid; there’s intelligence lurking behind those cat-like eyes, clear as day. English must be his second language, and Hongbin wonders where he’s from originally. “Well, thanks. For saving me, I mean. It can’t have been very pleasant. And… thanks for the chest. The clothes are much appreciated.”

Taekwoon just nods, ducking his head so his hair covers his eyes, and they fall into silence.

As desperate as Hongbin is to get back to his own space, he allows himself this moment of peace where he doesn’t have to move. The sunset is spectacular from this high up, oranges and pinks painting the sea a colour he does not even have a word for. There’s nothing but the gentle crackling of the fire and the quiet noise of the wind whistling past the spire, and even though Hongbin is sitting with a perfect stranger, he hasn’t felt this peaceful in a long time.

He finds himself watching Taekwoon without realising he’s doing it. His skin looks almost like molten gold in the dying sunlight, his hair so black it’s almost blue; when he looks up and meets Hongbin’s gaze, he smiles, eyes crinkling.

“Do you have a razor?” Hongbin blurts, only just now realising that Taekwoon is completely clean-shaven.

“Of course.” Taekwoon moves to the chest once more—it’s quickly becoming apparent it’s his equivalent of a bathroom cabinet—and pulls out a straight razor, shaving soap, a hand mirror and a small canteen of water, bringing them all over to Hongbin and laying them out on the sand in front of him.

Shaving soap! A straight razor! Hongbin runs his fingers over these luxuries like he has never seen them before, equal parts wonderment and confusion. “How…?” he asks, picking up the hand mirror and gazing at himself.

He does not like what he sees. His hair is long and impossibly tangled, and the scraggly excuse for a beard is absolutely hideous. He’s dirty—probably from the tunnel—and looks worryingly gaunt. More than that though is his eyes; there’s something about his expression, like he’s aged a decade in the short span of three weeks. He looks lifeless.

“They washed up here,” Taekwoon replies, already back to poking the fire, seemingly to keep his hands busy since it’s burning just fine. “Most of what you see washed up here.”

Hongbin shaves quickly, biting his tongue to stop himself from asking Taekwoon more questions. He finds that he almost doesn’t know how to socialise, although he can’t tell if it’s because he’s quickly grown used to being alone or because Taekwoon is, quite frankly, odd. Either way the silence makes the job easier and when he’s finished and washes the shaving soap off his face, he doesn’t look any less lethargic, but he _does_ look (and feel) more like himself.

“Thank you,” he mumbles, running a hand over his smooth face, yet another thing he just took for granted before—before. “I should… probably be getting back.” It’s not until he says this that he has no idea how to get back to his cave. “Would you, uh, mind showing me the way? I’ve been staying in this little cave that leads to the spring…”

“I know it.”

Hongbin pulls his shirt on and runs a hand over the bandage across his chest, taking shallow breaths reflexively. “Have you explored every part of this island?”

Taekwoon, already striding ahead around the wrecked ship, looks back and nods. “Most of it. Some of it is inaccessible.”

The walk doesn’t take long. There’s a tunnel hidden behind the wrecked ship, and the moment they step inside Hongbin realises he can’t see a damned thing. Taekwoon doesn’t seem to be concerned, though; his steps don’t falter and he doesn’t slow even as Hongbin has one hand on the wall to trace his path. The tunnel dips downward sharply and then doubles back on itself in a right-hand hairpin turn, and Hongbin nearly runs into Taekwoon in the gloom when he stops suddenly. “This is the tunnel leading to your… to where you have been sleeping.” He gestures in front of him. “Left leads down into the caves.”

To think that they were so close all this time… Hongbin’s eyes have adjusted by now, and sure enough he can see a slit in the rock in front of them, just wide enough for a man to fit through sideways. He must have somehow missed this every time he hurried through here; it’s not like he was looking for another tunnel, though, so it’s entirely possible. “Thank you,” he says, and holds out his hand for Taekwoon to shake.

Taekwoon just looks at it. “It is fine,” he murmurs, and then he’s disappearing into the inky blackness of the tunnel. It swallows him up, and Hongbin’s left staring at nothing, wondering if this whole awful day hasn’t been a nightmare after all.

 

***

 

He allows himself three days of rest.

Of course, said rest doesn’t start until he’s ventured down into the cave, fetched his prizes from _Escape_ , and made it back to his little cave. If he’s sitting around doing nothing all day, he may as well be productive and start fixing the sails—it’ll take more than three days to get them in seaworthy shape again, but a start is better than nothing. He stokes the fire, lays out the mainsail, and settles it over him like a blanket to begin stitching, wishing he had some form of music and humming to himself instead. It takes him a while to get used to the needle and thread once more, and he has to unpick most of his early attempts, but after a few hours he’s gotten the hang of it. It’s even peaceful, in a way.

“Um,” comes a voice from behind him, and he jumps and drives the needle right into his finger.

“Ow!” he gasps, pulling his hand away from the sail and getting to his feet, gritting his teeth at Taekwoon, who’s hovering in the entrance to the tunnel looking unsure. “Hello—”

He’s been deliberately not thinking of Taekwoon all day. He doesn’t quite know what to think of him; is he just an innocent but slightly odd man driven crazy by solitude, a la _Castaway_? Or is he dangerous? He hasn’t seemed threatening at all—and he’s saved Hongbin’s life, a fact he has to keep reminding himself of—but there’s just something about him that doesn’t make Hongbin feel right. It’s an unease, bone deep. The last time he felt it was when he read the weather report aboard _Drachen_ , and he’d made the mistake of not paying attention to that feeling and had ended up here as consequence. He is not about to do it again.

Not to mention the fact that he’s still not used to _not_ being alone. In fact, it almost feels like Taekwoon is intruding, which isn’t fair at all. He must catch Hongbin’s feelings on his face and starts backing away, hair falling in his face. “I will go—”

“It’s fine, you don’t need to go.” He steels himself and yanks the needle out, examining the drop of blood that wells up instantly. “What’s happening?”

“I came to see if I could help you in some way,” Taekwoon says, stepping delicately over the sand to crouch at the end of the mainsail. “And to bring you food.”

He holds out his cupped hands, and automatically Hongbin leans forward to look. Much to his surprise, Taekwoon is holding two eggs, slightly larger than a chicken’s egg and a pretty speckled cream colour. “Wow. Where did you get those?”

“A tree,” he deadpans, and Hongbin genuinely can’t tell if he’s making a joke or not. He doesn’t reply, just watches as Taekwoon moves over to the fire, which has grown a little low, and starts poking at it.

He is a man of few words, which is fine. Hongbin is too. He sits and stitches, although his mind isn’t on the job at hand and is on Taekwoon instead—Hongbin keeps glancing at him, his eyes somehow refusing to stay where he points them. Taekwoon takes the tin of matches and dumps them out on the sand before rinsing out the tin, cracking the eggs into it, and shoving it into the embers of the fire.

The silence grows. Taekwoon is sneaking glances at Hongbin whenever he thinks he isn’t looking, hair seemingly very deliberately in his face so Hongbin can’t tell what he’s thinking. Not that that matters, Hongbin realises; Taekwoon’s poker face is impressive, his expression schooled into one of perfect disinterest, and although he isn’t sure, it seems that Taekwoon is just as guarded as he is.

“Where are you from originally?” he asks, tone deliberately light.

“Italy.”

 _Italy?_ Hongbin brings the sail up to his face as if he’s inspecting the stitch he’s just done so he doesn’t give away what he’s thinking—which is _bullshit_. He can’t be sure, of course, but Taekwoon’s accent doesn’t seem Italian; in fact, it doesn’t sound like any other accent he’s ever heard. He isn’t an expert, of course, but part of being a merchant captain is that for the last five years he’s sailed with hugely multicultural crews and met people from all over the world in ports—including a few Italians.

“Oh, that’s nice. I’ve always wanted to go to Italy. I’ve heard sailing is lovely in the Mediterranean.”

“Do you like sailing?”

Hongbin snorts, pulling the needle up through the fabric of the sail. “I have to. It’s my job.”

“Your job?”

“Yeah.” When he looks up, Taekwoon is still crouched by the fire, but he’s not looking down at the eggs; instead he’s watching Hongbin, eyes bright with something that seems a little like interest. “I am—was—the captain of a merchant vessel called _Drachen_. A cargo ship.”

Taekwoon nods, looking back down at the fire and pulling out the tin with a stick. For a while Hongbin thinks he isn’t going to say anything, but then he sighs. “I grew up watching the sea… but I never learnt how to sail. It seemed… pointless.”

For a moment Hongbin is stunned into silence—that’s the most Taekwoon has said in one go, a snippet of information about his past that somehow raises more questions than it answers. “Why pointless?”

But Taekwoon is done talking. He shrugs, and then much to Hongbin’s alarm, picks up the tin—fresh from the fire and no doubt burning hot—and walks it over to Hongbin, placing it calmly on the sand next to him.

“Your hand!” Hongbin splutters, dropping the needle and reaching for it on instinct. Taekwoon backs away, though, eyes wide. “Didn’t you burn yourself?”

“I am fine.” He’s already making his escape, swerving around the sail and back to the tunnel before Hongbin can struggle onto his feet. “Enjoy the eggs.”

He’s gone, leaving Hongbin to stare at the tin lying innocently on the sand next to him, the unease curling through his veins and pressing on his chest.

 

***

 

On the second day of his self-imposed rest schedule, he wakes late in the morning and lays in bed for a few moments, watching the sun and the sea. His rib has been feeling better with the support of the bandage, but it still twinges when he raises his arms above his head or takes a deep breath, much to his irritation. He’s never been very good at being sick. Most of the time it meant he had to stay in bed and away from the sea, and dry land never held as much excitement for him as the ocean did.

Now, though? Now he casts a fearful glance over his shoulder as he hobbles to the spring. For whatever reason, the sea is angry with him and seems out to get him—even though he knows it’s idiotic to personify something that’s not living, he’s been doing it his whole life and finds it hard to break the habit—and he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. The freshwater of the spring, on the other hand, is safe. He washes his face and refills his canteen and turns to go, but is stopped by the glint of metal on one of the rocks near the lip of the spring.

It’s the razor he used the other day, as well as the shaving soap, the hand mirror, and much to Hongbin’s immense delight a bar of _actual soap_. It’s more of a sliver than a bar, really, and dried and cracked, but he’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He strips off and pours water on himself before lathering up his entire body, nearly moaning at the sensation of being properly clean. Just like with the clothes from the chest and the razor Taekwoon gave him, he feels like a new man when he rinses himself off; there’s something about being clean that’s so good for his mental health that he automatically feels a hundred times better than he did when he woke up. He doesn’t even know when Taekwoon snuck up here to leave these things, but doesn’t particularly care.

He carries the stuff back to his cave completely naked and pulls on the pair of pants he washed up in, not bothering with a shirt since he’s not going anywhere. Clean, wearing clean clothes, fresh shaven and with washed hair—he’s grinning to himself when he sits down to resume stitching up the sail. It’s the most human he’s felt in a long time, and even the tedious work of sewing isn’t so bad when he’s in such a good mood.

It’s not until late afternoon that his stomach grumbles, and when he shakes himself free of the trance he’s fallen into, he realises he hasn’t eaten anything and gets up to make himself some food. The eggs yesterday had been a rare treat; he’d scarfed them down when they were still hot, using the sail to hold the tin so he didn’t burn his hands, and they’d been absolutely delicious. He’s taking care to ration the tinned food he has, too. That is a finite supply, unlike the fish and fruit, and so even though it’s tempting to eat it all straight away he hasn’t allowed himself anything beyond the two cans of beans he ate in Escape’s cabin.

He pauses for a moment to admire the view, and movement on the shore catches his eye. It’s Taekwoon, standing in calf-deep water with what looks to be a spear in his hands, although from this height he’s absolutely tiny. As Hongbin watches, Taekwoon crouches over the water and then strikes; when he pulls the spear free, Hongbin can just spot a wriggling fish on the end of it.

Why he turns and heads for the tunnel instead of getting food, he’s not entirely sure. Curiosity? Perhaps. A desire for companionship? He doesn’t want to admit it to himself, but it’s likely. Even being at sea on _Drachen_ for weeks on end was different to this form of solitude. There he always had his crew with him, and he was alone by choice; here he has no choice. Or thought he didn’t. Taekwoon has thrown a wrench into things.

By the time he makes it down to the shore, Taekwoon has quite a few fish lying gasping in a weaved basket that’s quite obviously homemade. “Hey,” Hongbin calls by way of greeting, and Taekwoon doesn’t startle.

“Hello.” He doesn’t even look up from the water, spear tip hovering just above the surface of the calm ocean. When he strikes, Hongbin can see the savagery of his movement that wasn’t viewable from above; it’s sharp and sudden and sure, and a shiver runs down his spine.

“What are you doing?” When Taekwoon looks at him like he’s an idiot, he shrugs self-consciously, wrapping his arms over his chest. Perhaps he should have put on a shirt after all. “I just mean, there’s fish in the pen. Why are you catching these ones?”

“Those are better for eating straight away.” Taekwoon deposits his latest catch in the basket at Hongbin’s feet, and it looks reproachfully up at him as if to say _help me, you bastard!_ “These are leaner, better for smoking.”

While smoked fish doesn’t sound particularly appetising, it makes sense from a nutritional standpoint, and if one is moving about the island as much as Taekwoon seems to, it makes sense logistically too. Food you can eat on the go that’s not fruit sounds nice, actually.

He watches for a few more minutes, the uncomfortable silence growing, and then it reaches breaking point and he can’t stand there any longer. “Alright…. Well, sorry for bothering you,” he mumbles, and turns to go.

“Wait.” Taekwoon clambers out of the water and picks up the basket, tucking it under his arm. It’s not light—theres at least a couple of kilos of fish in there wriggling about—and he’s already carrying the spear, but he makes it look incredibly easy. “Come.” He says this last part like a command, and must realise it, because he ducks his head apologetically. “If you like.”

Why not? Hongbin falls into step behind him, staring at his back as they head back towards the middle of the spires. It’s funny how something that first disturbed him so immensely has become normal—he barely even notices the shape of them anymore, even if it’s always playing on his mind in the background. “What do you think of this?” he says, gesturing above them as they fall into the shadow of the larger one, the actual skull of the creature. “It’s weird, huh?”

“Very,” Taekwoon replies, and when he turns his head there’s a smile playing on his lips that Hongbin can’t understand.

He’s fine with silence, usually. Half his crew mates barely talk outside of mentioning work-related things; life at sea tends to attract quiet, contemplative types. But for some reason he just cannot stay silent around Taekwoon. Perhaps it’s because the reticence between them is not natural; perhaps it’s because Taekwoon barely speaks at all and Hongbin feels he must make up for it. Whatever the reason words build and build in him until they spill over, making him feel like he has no control over himself at all.

“It’s a skeleton, though, isn’t it?” he says, sticking a little closer to Taekwoon as they turn into a tunnel he hasn’t been through yet. “Of some enormous creature. And that’s… not normal. I haven’t seen anything like it. I haven’t even _heard_ of anything like it.”

“Hongbin,” sighs Taekwoon, and with a start Hongbin realises it’s the first time Taekwoon has said his name. “I don’t have answers for you. I am sorry. This island is a mystery to me as well.”

Well. That’s that, then. Hongbin doesn’t say anything more as they climb up and up until they spill out into Taekwoon’s cave. He doesn’t even say anything when Taekwoon hands him a knife. They settle on the sand across from each other and begin gutting and filleting the fish, laying the strips of meat out on a piece of fabric Taekwoon has produced from his ever-wondrous chest.

Hongbin cannot, for the life of him, figure Taekwoon out. It’s extremely confounding, and to his dismay, just makes him want to dig deeper—he should know by now to leave well enough alone, but he just knows somehow that there’s something more to this strange man.

“Do you ever wear a shirt?” he mutters under his breath as he moves onto his third fish.

He says it deliberately to get a rise out of Taekwoon, and to his surprise, it works. He snorts, and when Hongbin looks up he can see that Taekwoon is grinning. It’s the most genuine smile he’s seen on Taekwoon’s face thus far, and smiles back despite himself.

“Of course.” But his lack of tan lines belies his words, as does the fact that he’s still grinning wickedly. “Don’t you?”

Hongbin looks down at his chest reactively, bringing his arms up to cover himself. “I wasn’t planning on having company today,” he snipes back, ducking his head as Taekwoon starts laughing.

It’s an easy, natural moment, which surprises Hongbin. They’re strangers after all, forced together not out of choice but rather out of circumstance. They could hate each other. Taekwoon could still be a crazy cannibal. But it just feels… nice. It’s nice, and he wonders if Taekwoon is thinking the same when their eyes meet.

After rubbing the fish down with saltwater, they’re done, and Taekwoon quickly constructs a hanging rack for them from driftwood he has lying around and rope. He ties the knots quickly and deftly, and when Hongbin runs his hand over them he can feel they’re done nice and tight. He might make a sailor out of Taekwoon after all, although he doesn’t voice this; he doesn’t even know if Taekwoon would want to leave the island on Escape. He seems pretty entrenched here.

“How long does it take?” he asks once the fish are positioned above the fire, which Taekwoon has built up so it’s smoking away nicely.

Taekwoon, cleaning the knives, shrugs. “A couple of days. Are you hungry now?”

He is, very, but he just shrugs. “Yeah. A bit.”

“Wait,” Taekwoon commands, and then vanishes behind the boat.

The temptation for Hongbin to dig through his stuff is overwhelming, and surprising; he’s never been particularly nosy. But he wants to know what other treasures Taekwoon no doubt has in his chest. He wants to poke through it all and find out everything he can about Taekwoon—then, and only then, can he let down his guard. Even though today has been nice, there’s still that deep, unsettling feeling that all is not quite right. The longer they go without Taekwoon attempting to murder him (or something), the more absurd it feels, but still the feeling does not abate. And that has to count for something, right? Surely. Surely his instincts aren’t just being _completely_ overprotective?

But can he even trust himself anymore, on this horrible island of secrets?

Taekwoon returns before he can finish sorting through his moral dilemma, bringing that strange fruit that Hongbin’s been eating—about as large as a grapefruit but yellow on the outside with red, juicy flesh—and some more eggs. These he cooks quickly and they eat in silence, and although it’s nice, Hongbin’s mind is far away.

“These birds,” he starts around a bite of eggs, “how big are they?”

“About… this.” Taekwoon indicates with his hands a bird about the size of a duck. “Why?”

He’s dreaming of meat that’s not fish, is why, but he just takes another bite of eggs and shrugs. For all he knows Taekwoon might be a pescatarian. Or he might have an ethical objection. He then wonders why he even cares what Taekwoon thinks. “Have you ever eaten one?”

“They are very fast,” Taekwoon replies apologetically. “I could try spearing one, but catching them by hand is impossible.”

Hongbin just nods, filing that away. Maybe they can eat it it for his—their?—last meal on the island. For now he’ll have to make do with fish, fruit, the occasional eggs and, very sparingly, his tinned food. In fact, thinking about all the food he misses is a bad idea, because for some reason his mind instantly goes to cheese, and he’s never craved dairy with the intensity that he’s craving it now.

“Thanks for the eggs,” he says once he’s finished, hauling himself to his feet and dusting himself off. “Today and yesterday.”

“Thank you for the help with the fish.” Taekwoon stands up too and nods his head towards the vague direction of the tunnel. “Do you need help getting back?”

“No… I should be okay. Thanks.”

They stand there for a few more awkward seconds, just staring at each other, before Hongbin turns away and heads for the remains of the boat. He gets about halfway before remembering the stuff left for him in the morning and turns back, feeling like an idiot for not thanking Taekwoon straight away. “Oh, Taekwoon—thanks for the soap and stuff, too.”

Taekwoon looks up from the fire and gives him another smile, a genuine one, his eyes crinkling up into half-moons; an infectious, pretty smile. “Of course.”

Hongbin makes his way back to his cave slightly dazed, although he’s not even sure why.


	2. Chapter 2

He sort of expects to see Taekwoon out and about on his third day of rest, but he doesn’t appear and Hongbin feels awkward seeking him out again. Instead he spends the day by himself stitching up the sail, making good progress but feeling oddly restless without company.

Which is strange in of itself, because Taekwoon isn’t really much in the way of company. He barely talks, is strange, and instills a deep and unsettling fear in Hongbin that’s hard to overcome. So why Hongbin finds himself wishing to see him again, he isn’t sure.

There’s so much of himself he thought he knew until he washed up on this island. Now he feels like he barely knows himself at all. He has turned into a perfect stranger, almost as much as Taekwoon is, and he can’t do a single thing about it except sit and ruminate.

 

***

 

Although his rib still isn’t healed—as much as he wishes it was—with the constant bandaging and rest the pain is lessened, and on the fourth day he can stretch both arms above his head and figures that’s good enough. The journey back down to the bottom of the spire, now that he’s going with a purpose in mind, feels good. He’s practically skipping along right up until he faces the mouth of the tunnel where he nearly drowned, and his feet suddenly refuse to work.

It’s absurd. The tunnel isn’t even damp; there’s no water to be seen. And yet all he can feel is the pressing weight of tons and tons of water and rock pressing down on him, all he can see is darkness, and he swears his lungs feel heavy when he gasps, one hand on his chest. He didn’t feel this when he came and brought the food up; he’d been too focused on getting back without injuring his rib to really think about _Escape_ and the tunnels. Now he is here to resume work once more, however, the fear is crippling. It’s almost obscene, in a way. He can’t be afraid of the sea. He just _can’t_.

It takes him longer than he’d like to admit, but he eventually works up the courage to move into the tunnel. The cave is just as he left it, which doesn’t feel right; after nearly drowning, to find it looking so mundane is… almost disappointment. _Escape_ is still there, still resting on her keel with her belowdeck door swinging open, and Hongbin knows it’s his cursed, anxious mind, but she does not look much like a beacon of safety anymore.

He takes his time hauling himself aboard, being careful not to put any undue pressure on his rib. There’s nothing much of value left in the cabin—he’s scavenged most things of use—but he gathers all the paper left behind, loose sheets of it. Most of it is junk that’s blank on the back, which is exactly what he needs, and when he drops back down onto the sandy cave floor, he’s got a pen in hand too.

Drawing is not his specialty, but he quickly sketches out an outline of _Escape_ ’s shape and mirrors it, labelling one _port_ and the other _starboard_. It doesn’t take him long to crudely draw the extent of the damage to her hull, which is mostly concentrated on the starboard side, very low in the water. If he had to guess he’d assume she hit a reef or one of the rocks around here; how she didn’t sink, and ended up in this cave instead, is beyond Hongbin. He is grateful for it, though.

He stands there for a while, chewing his lip and considering. Taekwoon, too, is a blessing in disguise in this situation; if he’s willing to help, a lot of the work that needs to be done to make the hull watertight again is a two-man job. Hongbin just thankful that out of all the crap on this horrid island, the thing that is _not_ in short supply is wood.

The journey back up to his cave, as always, goes faster than the journey going down, but once he’s there he feels strangely restless. There’s nothing else he can do but continue to sew up the sail and think about how he’ll fix the hull, even if it feels rather pointless, and so reluctantly he folds himself to the floor and reaches for his sewing needle.

Taekwoon does not appear all day, and Hongbin lies to himself and thinks that this does not bother him.

 

***

 

Wake.

Eat.

Bathe.

Sew.

Sleep.

All he is reduced to.

 

***

 

It’s another two days before Taekwoon shows himself once more, and he comes with a soft-spoken apology and a bulging canvas bag slung over his shirted back.

Hongbin doesn’t know what to be more surprised about: the shirt, the bag, or the apology. In the end he settles on neither and invites Taekwoon in, not moving from where he’s sitting and sewing, content to just watch. “What’s in there?”

At this Taekwoon smiles, big and wide. “Look,” he says, and then reaches in the bag and pulls out a large dead bird, holding it by the neck. “I caught one!”

Hongbin is, quite honestly, speechless. Taekwoon looks unbelievably proud of himself. There’s a name for the feeling in Hongbin’s chest, but he doesn’t know it, and instead just basks in its warmth. Perhaps it’s relief—relief that this is what Taekwoon was doing in his absence, instead of sharpening his spear in preparation to use it on Hongbin.

(The slight feeling of dread he feels in Taekwoon’s presence, he notes, has not abated.)

“How did you do that?” he splutters, putting the needle down and getting to his feet. “I thought you said catching them by hand was impossible.”

Taekwoon shrugs, letting his hair fall into his face so his eyes are unreadable. “I learnt how.”

They fall into a companionable silence as Hongbin lights and stokes the fire and Taekwoon plucks and butchers the bird. They dither over how to cook it, until Taekwoon lashes together a spit out of rope and driftwood and they take turns rotating it.

“Hongbin,” Taekwoon starts hesitantly, and Hongbin looks up to see him crouching over the sail, running his hands over Hongbin’s stitches, blatantly evident given that the sail is crimson and the thread is white. “Would you like help with this?”

“You know how to sew?”

“Only a little bit.”

Hongbin hums, switching arms to keep turning the bird—it should be done soon, thankfully. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to… it’s a big job, and—”

“I want to help you,” Taekwoon interrupts, eyes strangely fierce, and Hongbin is momentarily stunned.

“Well… alright. It’s pretty easy. I’m doing a simple diagonal stitch. Most of the sail tore in the same way, so it should do just fine. You’ll be able to see if you look close—I’m just following the stitch of the original material.” He gestures at the sailor’s palm lying next to the needle. “That thing is helpful. It’s called a sailor’s palm, and makes it easy to push the needle through thick layers of fabric.”

Taekwoon picks it up. It’s a strange looking thing, a leather strap that fits around the hand with a hole for the thumb and a flat, circular piece of metal to aid in pushing the needle. “Interesting,” he murmurs, slipping it on.

Before he can start sewing, though, the bird is done. They eat with their fingers, and the moment Hongbin takes a bite of one of the legs he lets out a moan, much like he did with the beans—but oh, canned and expired beans cannot compare to meat fresh from the spit. It’s delicious and he doesn’t care that he probably looks a sight, with juice dribbling down his chin and fingers; he’s too busy eating like he’s not eaten in a month.

He catches Taekwoon watching him—he’s eating more delicately, although still with enthusiasm—and offers him a smile. “Thank you for this. You don’t know what it means to have proper meat again.”

“It’s nice.” Taekwoon sucks on one of the bones, lips forming a perfect O, and for some reason Hongbin is mesmerised. “I don’t know how I will be able to go back to fish.”

Between the two of them they manage to finish off the bird, although they’re so full that for a while afterwards they end up lying on the sand to digest. It’s so comfortably familiar that Hongbin forgets they’re strangers, and he can feel himself dozing off, strangely comforted by Taekwoon’s presence just off to his right; Hongbin can feel the heat of his arm, close enough to touch.

The more time they spend together—and the more Taekwoon seemingly reveals himself as a normal, albeit extremely reserved and odd person—the more this feeling of comfort has begun to overtake the one of dread. It’s still there, rearing its ugly head whenever he thinks too hard about everything on this island that does not add up, but he knows now that he will never get to the bottom of it all. This dreadful place is determined to keep its secrets, and who is he to force them out? All he needs to do is survive the next three weeks, fix _Escape_ , and then he can resume his life.

As they doze, time moves slowly; Hongbin wakes up and rolls over to see Taekwoon watching the sea, closes his eyes, opens them once more and sees Taekwoon watching him. He startles at this, blushing and looking away, and something in Hongbin’s chest twinges.

When at last they’ve napped away their lethargy, they begin sewing. Hongbin makes do without the sailor’s palm, giving it to Taekwoon to get used to, and uses the other, smaller needle to begin working on one of the smaller rips. Taekwoon gets the hang of it very quickly, and they stitch away in silence.

“Hongbin,” Taekwoon murmurs some time later, and Hongbin snaps out of the trance he falls in when his hands are busy—his mind was somewhere far away, somewhere beneath the waves and in the deep, with _Drachen_. “How did you get here?”

Hongbin just stares.

“You said your ship was called… _Drachen_?” prompts Taekwoon gently, eyebrows furrowing together.

He can’t speak of it. He mustn’t. By not speaking of it it will remain locked away in a part of his mind he doesn’t want to open—for fear of the consequences, for fear of knowledge. Instead he just shakes his head mutely, looking at the stitch he’s pulling like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen.

Taekwoon doesn’t press the issue and falls silent once more, but the unspoken weight of the question hovers in the air between them and Hongbin can’t ignore it, as much as he wants to.

 

***

 

Hongbin doesn’t know whether to be surprised or not when Taekwoon turns up the next morning, sitting himself down on the sand and soundlessly reaching for the needle and thread. Hongbin hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about himself yesterday, but then again, neither has Taekwoon the entire time they’ve known each other—which, Hongbin notes as he stares at the marks on the wall, is nine days. It’s not that long, really. Certainly not long enough to be trusting each other complicity. But it’s just over a third of the total time that Hongbin’s been on the island—although it’s hard to believe it’s been twenty-five days, nearly a month—and he feels like that should count for something. Maybe he’s just being paranoid. Maybe Taekwoon is normal. Maybe he’s not going crazy.

“You’re wearing a shirt again,” he mumbles after they’ve been sewing for a while, making good progress.

It’s an attempt at idle conversation more than anything, but Taekwoon looks down at himself and then back up at Hongbin with a playful glint in his eye. “Of course. I thought my shirtlessness offended you.”

“It didn’t _offend_ me, I just—” Hongbin splutters, before realising he’s completely rising to Taekwoon’s bait and shutting himself up. “Yes. It offended my very delicate sensibilities.”

They fall silent again, but Taekwoon is smirking to himself and Hongbin is—he’s sure—going all red, although he’s not sure why. This is the type of banter he’d have with his crew (albeit the ones he’s closest to, and the topic would probably be different—but still), but with Taekwoon it feels different. Strange. He’s not used to it.

He’s also not used to being idle for so long, even though he knows it’s good for his rib. While merchant shipping isn’t exactly as hands-on as pleasure sailing is, he at least had to do things; sewing was a nice distraction for a while, but now he’s sadly settled into life on the island, it’s just dull. The good news is that with Taekwoon’s help, it won’t take long at all before the sail is finished. The bad news is his back is hurting from curling over the sail to see properly, and his hands are cramping from holding the needle for so long, and after a while he’s so fed up that he flings the needle down dramatically and groans, stretching his back. “I need a break.”

“Yes. Good idea.” Taekwoon puts his needle down—more gently than Hongbin—and rolls his shoulders. “What about swimming?”

Hongbin stares at him. It’s as if he’s said _what about jumping off the top of the spire for fun?_ The last few times he’s been in the water have been the opposite of pleasant, and he has no desire to go near the ocean again. But, then again… Maybe a nice swim is what he needs. It _is_ kind of warm in the little cave. The more he thinks about it, the more it seems like a good idea, and after a bit he nods. “Alright. Let’s go.”

They pick their way down to sea level slowly, eating fruit as they go. Hongbin lets Taekwoon lead, figuring he’ll know where on the island is best for swimming. At first he thinks they’re heading for the fish pen, but Taekwoon keeps going, out of the shadow of the spires—the _skull_ —and down along the creature’s neck. Hongbin hasn’t come this far; he found _Escape_ and got distracted. It mostly seems to be the same as the rest of the island’s rocky shores. Junk, flotsam and jetsam and ancient-looking wood and rotting rope. Certainly nothing of use, so he disregards it all.

Where the creature’s neck meets its ribs, the ground beneath their feet turns sandy instead of rocky, and Hongbin stops, entranced. The enormous ribs hang over their head, almost dipping down into the water, but it’s almost easy to ignore when the small beach in front of them looks as enticing as it does—the ocean is flat and calm, a gentle breeze blowing the smell of salt towards them, and Hongbin is surprised to find he has no fear at all.

“This is—I mean, wow.” He turns to Taekwoon, about to say something more, and is shocked into silence when he sees that Taekwoon has shed his shirt and has his thumbs in the waistband of his pants, about to pull them down. “Hang on, Taekwoon, what are you doing—”

“What?” Taekwoon blinks innocently at him. “I don’t want to get my clothes wet.”

“But you don’t have to—Jesus Christ,” Hongbin mutters, closing his eyes just in time. He waits until he can hear enthusiastic splashing to open them again, and thankfully Taekwoon’s in the water up to his neck, grinning up at Hongbin.

“The water is nice,” he calls, and then splashes Hongbin. “Come on.”

He dithers about what to do, his worries about being in the sea again entirely forgotten in the wake of Taekwoon’s ridiculousness—which was maybe his point. In the end he takes off his shirt but keeps his pants on, wading in up to his thighs before dipping beneath and surfacing with a flourish. Taekwoon was right; the water is a lovely temperature, and he can’t even start to panic over the sensation because Taekwoon swims right up to him and splashes him again.

It’s like how they first met. Taekwoon’s hair is pushed off his face, his eyelashes sparkling with water drops, and he looks so different that Hongbin is momentarily stunned. It’s not that—it’s not that he didn’t realise Taekwoon was attractive. It’s just that it was easy to overlook when his hair hung in his face and he rarely smiled. Like this, the knowledge is alarmingly present, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. Not that he _wants_ to do anything about it. It’s just there, hanging in the air between them, and to get away from the awkwardness he dips below the waves again and does a handstand.

They swim for what seems like hours, racing each other—Taekwoon wins, to no-one’s surprise—and doing laps, Hongbin teaching Taekwoon the different strokes. It’s pleasant with the sun beating down on them, and after a while they end up silently floating on their backs, Hongbin avoiding looking at Taekwoon for obvious reasons.

“Taekwoon,” he says, and Taekwoon responds with a hum. “You don’t have to… Um, feel free not to tell me. But I was just… I was wondering how you got here. I know you said you were shipwrecked too?”

The irony of him asking this, particularly after their non-discussion yesterday, is not lost on him. Perhaps that’s why the question has been playing on his mind. The closer they get the more it nags at him that there’s not a lot he actually knows about Taekwoon: how old he is, if he has any family, what he did before, what his favourite colour is—it’s all an utter mystery.

The fact that he’s staring at a giant rib is an utter mystery, too, but he’s almost given up on figuring that one out.

“Um.” Taekwoon dips into the water so just his head is visible, nibbling at his bottom lip. “There is not much to say. It was a pleasure yacht… we got into a storm and it sunk. I woke up here.” He shrugs, but the movement is laboured. “That was that.”

Hongbin doesn’t dignify this with a response. If he does he won’t be able to hide the irritation growing in him. He has no right to be angry, he knows; Taekwoon is under no obligation to open up to him if he doesn’t want to. But he must know that the more he chooses to be secretive the more it makes him look like he’s hiding something.

“I see,” he eventually replies, tone flat.

They don’t speak further for the rest of the time they are in the water. There’s nothing to say, anyway.

 

***

 

They spend the next day sewing, barely speaking, the both of them lost in their own heads. They’re close to finishing, but Hongbin hardly even notices. He’s too busy replaying their conversation from yesterday over and over again, trying to figure out what bothered him so much about it.

Part of it is realising that as hard as he tries, it is becoming apparent that he cannot ignore everything that is wrong about this island. He just can’t. There’s too much. The shape of it. The skeleton. The sea, refusing to let him go. The amount of _stuff_ washed up on its shores. The fact that it does not exist on any chart he’s seen. Taekwoon himself. He feels like he’s going quite mad trying to figure it out, like it’s a jigsaw puzzle missing pieces—he can’t see the bigger picture until he has it all laid out in front of him.

It doesn’t help that he’s logical to a fault. Once upon a time sailors were the most superstitious of all, prone to believing in things that did not really exist—but as time passed and the oceans became less mysterious, that changed. The sea is a friend, but she is also just a job. Things like this island can’t exist, because they can’t be explained logically, and that’s where he’s getting caught up: it _does_ exist. It _can’t_ be explained logically. And thus he is lost.

Has he lost his mind and doesn’t even know it?

Taekwoon bids him goodnight at sunset, and Hongbin lies on his back for the longest time, not moving, not doing anything except staring at the ceiling and thinking. Thoughts of _Drachen_ keep floating into his mind as much as he doesn’t want them to, perhaps spurred on by his dip into the sea yesterday—when he closes his eyes it comes in flashes, rain and wind and confusion and the awful, awful noise of _Drachen_ splitting apart. It’s a noise he’s never heard before and will hopefully never hear again—a marvel of human engineering tearing itself apart at the molecular level, metal screaming and groaning and reverbing through his head until he has to sit up and get to his feet just to prove he’s not really there again. It doesn’t help. He clutches his head and crouches, breathing, but his heart is racing and the one thought racing through his mind is the one he’s never allowed himself to think for fear of what it will do to him:

_What if I killed them all?_

His crew trusted him and he led them astray, unforgivably so. If they didn’t survive—if they died at his hands—he does not know how he will live with himself. He needs to, God, he needs to get off this fucking island and get back to civilisation—it is ripping him apart and dragging him asunder and he is utterly helpless to do anything but watch.

 

***

 

“Hongbin.”

Hongbin hasn’t slept—more than an hour or so, anyway—and so turns blearily from where he is sitting watching the sunrise. “Taekwoon,” he croaks in greeting, and the shock at his appearance is evident on Taekwoon’s face. He must look like shit. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” Taekwoon picks his way over the sail and sits next to Hongbin, close but not too close, nearly touching but not quite, always this pretense of distance. He’s back to not wearing a shirt, although Hongbin hates himself for noticing.“Are… are you alright?”

He’s not. He’s falling apart at the seams and he’s not even sure why. But to explain would be too much effort, so he just attempts a smile and nods. “Yeah, I just—I couldn’t sleep.”

“I… wanted to apologise. For the other day.” When Hongbin looks up, he can see that Taekwoon looks uncharacteristically anxious, hands twisting in his lap. “I… don’t mean to come off so unapproachable and closed off. I am not… I am not used to human company, after so long.” He smiles, but it’s weak. “I don’t know how to be anything but myself. And it seems I am not even very good at doing that.”

It’s possibly the most genuine thing Taekwoon has said in the entire time they have known each other, and Hongbin is temporarily stunned into silence. He doesn’t know what to say. Taekwoon’s honesty means more to him than he can articulate, especially in the wake of his cascading thoughts yesterday; he looks back out to the sea to gather himself. “Thanks for apologising, Taekwoon.”

“Should we start sewing? We are nearly finished the repairs.”

“Sure.”

He turns to survey the sails with a fresh eye and is impressed at what he sees. The mainsail is nearly finished. There’s one more rip to be repaired and then it’s done; only the jib remains, which won’t take long at all. The repairs aren’t pretty—with the mismatched thread, the sail looks rather patchwork and homemade—but they’re strong and they’ll do the job, which is all he needs. Taekwoon has helped hurry the task along immensely.

His mind is still clouded as they start sewing, but there’s less of a weight on his shoulders, and every time he meets Taekwoon’s eye and he smiles he feels a little better. All he can do is all he’s been doing since the beginning: compartmentalise, cope, and get off the island.

He gives the mainsail to Taekwoon and starts on the jib, making quick work of it after doing so much sewing in the past week. It only takes a few hours before they’re done, Hongbin finishing up the jib quite neatly, and when he leans back to look he feels his chest well up with pride. He is one step closer to home, and it feels damn good.

“Shall we celebrate?” Taekwoon asks as they’re folding the sail, passing the material back and forth. “I can catch a bird…”

“That sounds… great, actually.” Hongbin smiles at him, and it must look like a better attempt than last time, because Taekwoon brightens at the sight of it.

They go together to catch the bird, moving in silence at Taekwoon’s command. They take a twisty tunnel right up to the top of the spire where there’s some trees growing, and at first Hongbin doesn’t know where to look, until Taekwoon points and he sees a huge nest in the fork of one of the branches. There’s two birds sitting there, and Hongbin can’t help himself—his stomach grumbles.

He watches quietly as Taekwoon approaches the tree, creeping almost impossibly silent and slow. The nest is about eye height, and Taekwoon doesn’t strike until he’s right next to it—one moment he is standing there, eyes on the bird, and the next he has one by the neck. He moves so fast Hongbin doesn’t even see it, and although most of Hongbin is amazed, there’s a little bit of him wondering _how—?_ Is that what they learn in Italy, how to catch birds blindingly fast?

They cook it over the fire again, and by the time it’s ready and smelling heavenly it’s past sunset. They’re both still broody—Hongbin was completely lost in his thoughts as he turned the bird over the spit mindlessly—and when they sit down to eat together, Hongbin clears his throat.

“My ship… was called _MV_ _Drachen_ ,” he starts suddenly, hesitant. Taekwoon looks up in surprise, mouth falling open as if to speak, but Hongbin just shakes his head. He needs to get this out, the words burning in him, begging to be heard. They have been since day one, but after yesterday they’re alarmingly present and refusing to go away—and he’s getting tired of swallowing them, seeing as they just seem to surface once more regardless.

“She was getting old. Past her prime. We all knew she only had a few more years left before she was scrapped. It’s not to say she was unsafe—she was built well and was solid. It just meant we… had to be more careful, I suppose. Less room for complacency.”

Over the flickering light of the fire, Taekwoon’s face is carefully blank, and it helps.

“There was… a culture surrounding safety at my company.” Here it’s hard to hide the bitterness creeping into his voice, as best he tries; he’s been carrying this particular cross for a long time. “Or rather, surrounding the lack of it, although it was never that blatant. There was an unspoken rule that if you had concerns about your ship, or your route, or your crew, and you said something about it, you’d be fired or demoted. On the face of it the company always talked about their commitment to safety and other bullshit like that. But behind closed doors, it was just about profit margins.” He shrugs. “Like every company. Merchant shipping is a profitable business, I suppose.”

_They’d all seen it. They’d all heard it. But they didn’t talk about it. Captains leaving the company for no reason after ordering their ships towed for repairs. Rumours of stern talking-tos for those who waited for bad weather to pass. Deliberate blind eyes turned to rust and age-related wear during inspections. But to put food on the table they all did what they must._

“I’m not saying this to… absolve myself of any guilt. But these are just the circumstances I found myself in. And there was no reason to think that this journey was going to be any different from all the others we’d done that month on the same route. Yeah, there was a storm predicted, but that was fine. I’d seen plenty of storms at sea. You just have to know how to manage them.”

He looks down and picks at the bird, suddenly not hungry. Taekwoon coughs, gently, and then shifts on the sand. “What kind of ship was _Drachen_?”

“A bulk carrier. We mostly carried coal. Sometimes ore. She was about seven hundred and fifty feet long. Part of a size category called Panamax, which means they can fit through the Panama Canal—” He cuts himself off before he really gets going into a tedious ship rant, which Taekwoon probably won’t appreciate. “Anyway. As I said. Old, but not on her way out just yet.

“Our journey wasn’t very long. Took about three days one way. I saw the weather reports and I took a gamble. I figured the storm wouldn’t be as severe as they were predicting, because most of the time in that area they weren’t—they came from the south and blew over fast, bringing good weather behind them. I’d seen it hundreds of times before and this time… My luck ran out, I guess.”

_Standing on the bridge, weather reports in hand, Hongbin squints out at the sky, past Drachen’s bow, past the conveyors loading iron ore into her belly, trying to see. Of course, he can’t see a thing. The sky is a beautiful blue with a few wispy clouds dotted about. It doesn’t look threatening in the least, but then it won’t until the storm is almost upon them._

_The chief mate shifts behind him, peering over his shoulder at the papers Hongbin’s clutching. “What do you think?”_

_“It’ll blow over.” Hongbin glances back down at the paper, reading the predictions. The meteorologists have been wrong before, and he likes to think he knows these waters better than they do. “You know what these southerly squalls are like. Over and done after a bit of hysteria.”_

_He’s not sure why it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself as well as her._

“So we went. And after nineteen hours at sea the storm hit, just like they predicted it would. At first it wasn’t any nastier than I thought it would be. The southerlies are… They blow in hard and fast but they don’t last very long at all. But this one didn’t show any signs of letting up.”

_He is nearly flung out of bed by the pitch of the waves—making his way to the bridge is a struggle. What he sees when he gets there makes him frown, makes his heart start to race. These waves are big. Not enormous, not yet, but big, and he can feel the strain the ship is under every time it slams back down into the trough of one._

_“Still gonna blow over, do you think?” the chief mate jokes, slapping him on the shoulder companionably._

_The autopilot is holding their heading, and they’re luckily faced into the waves so they’re not experiencing much roll—pitch up-and-down the ship can handle better than rolling side-to-side. All he can see through the windscreen is rain lashing the glass and, dimly, waves breaking over their bow._

_“She’ll be fine,” he replies, patting the wheel confidently._

“And—and I think that if you took a brand new ship and put them in that storm that they’d have done fine. The crew’d all be sick as dogs, but the ship would be fine. But _Drachen_ …” He shrugs, meeting Taekwoon’s eyes before looking into the fire once more. “Her age was showing. We were making slow progress and the storm wasn’t getting any worse, so I thought we’d be okay, you know? And then we started to list. There was—I still don’t know how water got in the hold, but by the time we’d worked out why we were leaning to one side, it was too severe to counteract. The bilge pumps were working overtime until one of them just… failed. We were leaning over to port, to the left, pretty severely. And this is all something that would have been manageable in calm weather, but in that storm… I ordered us to turn to the southwest slightly, so the waves were pushing us over to starboard, to the right, while we tried to fix it, get the bilge pumps working again so they could pump out the water.”

_The nervousness on the bridge is palpable now—to use the sea itself to try and right a list is insane. Hongbin knows it. They all know it. But what else can he do? They are kilometres offshore, in the middle of a storm, and running out of options._

_At least for the moment it seems to be working. They’re mostly level when the waves hit them, pushing them over to starboard, but the roll back to port is severe. It’s a balancing act. If he doesn’t play it right, the ship will capsize._

“And then the engines failed.”

_There’s a certain elegance about the throb of an engine at sea, a particular sort of comfort it brings. It is felt in the walls and the floor more than anything else, a constant, pervasive vibration that one learns to tune out after a while. Now, however, there is chaos. A vicious clunk, and then a low whine, and then—_

_Silence._

_It is in that silence, broken only by the groaning of the metal beneath their feet and the howling of the wind outside, that all on board know they are doomed._

“We were… I mean, unless we could get the engines restarted, we were just gone. You can’t come back from that. And we tried, the engineers tried, but she wouldn’t start. She was old and she’d had it and—I don’t know. The oil pressure was… She just gave up. The wind pushed us over so we were facing starboard side to the waves, which meant the list was just getting worse. I ordered abandon ship and hit the emergency locator beacon, and at that point they only just managed to launch the lifeboats. The list was so bad they were nearly already in the water and barely had to be lowered—”

_Wind, waves, his chief mate going tumbling overboard, Hongbin’s heart in his throat, he’s killed them all, it’s all his fault—_

“And, Taekwoon, standing on the deck was just—the wind and the rain were just coming, and the waves were coming, and I could barely see, and it was awful. The first lifeboat made it away fine but it disappeared from view. I couldn’t see it from where I was standing. And then as—as I was standing on the deck, she split apart underneath me. The second lifeboat… It capsized and in the chaos afterwards I was swept away from it. The last thing I remember was… clinging to a piece of wood and watching as Drachen sank. I—I don’t even know what happened to my crew. I don’t know if they… survived.”

Silence settles over them, blanketing them in its warmth. When Hongbin finally has the strength to look up from the fire and meet Taekwoon’s gaze, he doesn’t know what he expects to find—judgment, derision, scrutiny, all of the above. It’s what he deserves. Instead, though, there’s sympathy in Taekwoon’s eyes, and that’s almost too much to take in. He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see it because he can’t. He _can’t_.

“Hongbin…” Taekwoon sighs, and Hongbin can hear him shuffle closer across the sand. “It wasn’t your fault—”

“Yes, it was,” Hongbin interrupts, eyes snapping open. “Don’t lie to me like that, because it absolutely was my fault, and I could have prevented this whole thing from happening with one word. And my arrogance did not allow me.”

“It—maybe you had some fault,” Taekwoon admits, “but you said it yourself—the company had expectations—”

Hongbin stands up, unable to listen to this anymore. “At the end of the day I was captain. I was responsible for their lives—twenty-three people relied on me and I let them down, probably killing them.” He shakes his head, backing away as Taekwoon reaches out a pleading hand as if to comfort. “It’s true and there’s nothing you can say that will change that.”

He flees down the tunnel, running blindly for the sake of running, knowing that it’s juvenile and not caring. Taekwoon does not follow, and for this he is grateful.

 

***

 

He’s eager to put yesterday’s conversation behind him, and so, it seems, is Taekwoon, because he doesn’t mention anything of it when he appears in Hongbin’s cave in the morning, gesturing at the neatly folded sails. “What are you going to do with these?”

“Rig the yacht.” He stretches, taking a deep breath in to check his rib, relieved when there’s no pain. “I should be alright to climb up the mast—” At Taekwoon’s blank look, he gestures. “The tall rod in the middle of the ship.”

“You’re going to climb _up?_ To the _top?_ ” Taekwoon folds his arms over his (shirtless once more) chest and glowers. “No.”

“What the hell do you mean, _no?_ ”

Taekwoon rolls his eyes. “I mean you are still injured. I will do it.”

“You don’t know how—”

“You can show me.”

Somehow, given the fierce look in Taekwoon’s eyes, Hongbin has a feeling he is not going to back down from this. And it’s not that Hongbin’s not stubborn too, because he is; it’s just that he knows how to pick his battles, and this one is almost certainly one he is not going to win. “Fine,” he sighs, and points at the sails. “Bring those, and follow me.”

As is standard for them, they’re silent as they make their way through the tunnel system to the cave below. Maybe it’s just Hongbin being oversensitive, or maybe he’s used to Taekwoon’s quirks, but he almost feels like Taekwoon wants to say something—about yesterday, or something else, he can’t tell. But he wants to put yesterday’s conversation out of his mind completely, and so says nothing. He doesn’t regret it—it felt good to get the words out, to vocalise the fear that’s been building and building in the back of his head—but he certainly doesn’t want to say anything more about it.

“Okay,” Hongbin says once they’re standing on the deck of _Escape_ , sails at their feet. “Climbing up the mast is quite simple. If you start from that rock platform, you’re already about halfway there. Then you just pull yourself up—I used a ladder—and once you’re up there I can tell you what to do.” He catches Taekwoon’s worried glance and nods at him encouragingly. “Don’t worry. It’s easy. You’ll be fine.”

Taekwoon doesn’t look convinced, but he’s agile enough that he makes the job look easy as he leaps from the rock platform to the mast, finding his way onto the wobbly rope ladder and inching himself upward, one rung at a time.

“Once you’re up there, there’s going to be a….” He looks at his feet, at the neatly-organised coils of rope—his doing, not Taekwoon’s—and spots the main halyard. “A green rope. It’ll have a clip on the end of it.”

“I see it.”

“Right. When I was up there it was tangled, so I just unclipped it and let the sail fall. If you can, try and untangle it, and then bring it down. Just clip it to your pants instead.”

Taekwoon does one better, though; he untangles the mess of ropes and frees the halyard, waving it about and crowing in victory before sticking the rope between his teeth and beginning the journey downward.

Hongbin’s mind is on the job at hand. He’s thinking of how to re-rig the sail, something he’s not done in years; he’s thinking of how he might have to go hunting for new ropes, seeing as some of these are on their way out; he’s got one eye on Taekwoon while trying to hold the ladder steady, and he has no premonition, no awful sense of dread. His instincts, it seems, fail him, and he is entirely unprepared for what happens next.

Taekwoon doesn’t jump off at the rock platform as expected. Instead he quickly climbs down the ladder to the deck, where Hongbin is, only he loses his balance and falls on the second to last rung. He’s only about a foot off the deck, but Hongbin reacts on impulse and catches Taekwoon as he falls, arms sliding around Taekwoon’s waist, accidentally pulling them both backwards a few steps until they find their balance.

For a moment, all is still. All that floats through Hongbin’s mind is: _huh, he’s really warm,_ and, _oh,_ and, _this is the first time we’ve properly touched since we met_ —and then the heat under his arms grows and grows until it burns, and when he drops Taekwoon and hisses, he cannot explain what he’s looking at.

Taekwoon is glowing. Red-orange is burning through him from his chest outwards, lighting him up from the inside out, and all Hongbin can think is— _what?_ It doesn’t—what is he looking at? “Taekwoon?” he murmurs, but it’s not until he meets Taekwoon’s eyes that his stupor turns to abject fear.

“Go,” Taekwoon snarls, but he’s no longer himself. His eyes are glowing red, his face a map of red veins, and he falls to his knees. “Hongbin, _run!”_

But Hongbin can’t. He doesn’t know what he’s looking at. He can’t—it doesn’t make sense—Taekwoon can’t be _glowing_ —and then with a horrible scream, Taekwoon flings his arms wide and the world explodes.

Hongbin is an animal, reduced to the basest of impulses, and so he turns and runs, dropping off _Escape_ ’s deck and sprinting for the cover of the nearest rock. Taekwoon’s scream turns from something human into something _not_ , and when Hongbin turns to look he turns and he looks upon his death, because on the deck of the little sailboat is not a human, not anymore, it’s nothing like a human, it’s a creature familiar and alien and impossible all at once—

It’s a dragon.

“Fuck,” he breathes, and the dragon’s enormous head snaps around to focus on him.

Time slows and then stops entirely. They are frozen, the two of them, Hongbin and the-dragon-that-used-to-be-Taekwoon, but Hongbin’s mind is moving at a thousand miles an hour. The _skeleton_ —it must be. This island is… a dragon? But. But dragons don’t exist. They can’t exist. They’re a fucking myth—

“Taekwoon?” he whimpers.

The dragon roars, that same red-orange in its eyes spreading through its chest like a virus, glowing and building until Hongbin ducks behind the rock just in time for his world to erupt in fire. He screams, covering his ears, sobbing with fear—fear fear fear, he reeks of it, it ekes out of his pores and through his tears—he’s never been afraid, not like this, because he knows he’s going to die at the hands of a creature that does not exist.

He turns and runs for cover, leaping for the next rock, knowing he needs to get to the tunnel—it’s so huge it can’t fit in the tunnel. Out of his peripheral he sees _Escape_ , deck crushed, mast dwarfed by this hideous creature, and makes it behind the rock just in time for more fire to surround him.

Tunnel. Go. He runs, hiccuping, forgetting how to breathe, forgetting time and space and knowing nothing but the overwhelming desire to get away. He makes it to the mouth of the tunnel and dares a glance behind him— _Escape_ crushed beneath the creature’s feet and burning, the cave is burning, his chances burning, and so he runs.

The creature doesn’t follow, but he hears it shriek as he sprints—and then flings himself to the floor, wailing mindlessly as more fire appears. But he can’t stay here. He’s on his feet and running running running, tripping, falling, running, spilling out into the huge cavern and mind racing—where can he go? Where is safe?

His instincts take over and he runs for the crevice. It’s impossible to sprint at full speed across the rocky, uneven ground, and he keeps falling over, but all he can hear is his rasping breath in his ears and over it, a horrible unnatural sound, so he does not stop. The world shakes around him and he falls as the creature lands behind him, but he just picks himself up and keeps going. The crevice is ahead—if he can—if he can just—

He makes it inside and wedges himself in so far the rock pins him there, and he covers his ears and screams and screams and screams.

 

***

 

There in the crevice, in that awful ash-covered crevice, deep in the bones of a dead dragon—

There is where he loses himself.

He regresses entirely, pinned to his feet between the two slabs of rock and sobbing helplessly, sobbing so hard he can’t breathe. He claws the walls until his fingers are bleeding. He screams, a human stripped of all rationality and rebuilt in fear, and knows with full certainty that he is about to die. He can’t even begin to process what he’s just seen. He does not know how.

When he closes his eyes, it all flashes in front of him: _Drachen_ ’s stern disappearing into the deep, the hateful skull of the island, Taekwoon, Taekwoon’s smile, Taekwoon’s kindness, Taekwoon, Taekwoon—a dragon—a dragon— _no,_ he sobs, opening his eyes. But it’s no use. He can still see it all.

He wishes the sea had claimed him from the start. He begs for her embrace, over and over again until he’s hoarse, but she cannot find him. He is trapped in the rock and lost.

 

***

 

He sleeps and dreams of the sea, of creatures in the deep.

He wakes and hears the screams of a nightmare-beast brought to life.

It is too much.

 

***

 

_No._

Breathe.

Compartmentalise.

Survive.

He hasn’t heard the horrible creature roaring for hours now. In fact, he hasn’t heard anything, not even rocks scattering as it moves around, or the awful sounds of its rattling breath. Moving as carefully as he can, mind completely blank, he slowly edges his way towards the exit of the crevice, peering out and half-expecting to get his head bitten off, quite literally. He sees nothing but the cavern, empty save scorch marks, and knows he needs to move.

He is safe, at least, in the tunnels. It is too large to fit in them. He goes to run upwards, to the safety of his cave, but something makes him pause, and creeping quietly and quickly he backtracks, retracing his steps until he’s standing in the cave where _Escape_ is.

Or where _Escape_ was. She is no more. Instead she’s a charred pile of wood, the metal for her mast twisted and unrecognisable, the sails that they spent so long slaving over burnt into nothing. He falls to his knees, in the two inches of water there that’s coming in with the tide, and stares.

 _Escape_ was his only chance to get off the island. His hope is gone. He is no more.

He leaves quickly, unable to stand the sight of all that burnt wood. He runs upwards, reaching his cave in record time and grabbing the knife, putting it in the waistband of his pants and hefting the hatchet with two hands.

It’s with mind and eyes empty that he makes his way upwards again, to Taekwoon’s cave. He knows now what he must do—his last act on this hateful, spiteful island will be the thing he should have done all along. He doesn’t let himself feel. He doesn’t have room for it. All he can do is put one foot in front of the other, numb and completely and utterly resigned. There is no hope. There are no more chances. The island has won.

His heart is in his mouth as he emerges from the mouth of the tunnel, fully expecting to see a dragon splayed across the floor—but instead there’s nothing except Taekwoon, curled up in a ball, naked and sobbing on the sand.

He moves as if in a dream. His steps across the sand are light, soundless, and he raises the hatchet, prepared to swing it down and cut off Taekwoon’s head; his arms tremble and he grits his teeth, wanting—needing—to see blood soak into the bone of the island, needing blood to be spilled, needing retribution. But he has dined with Taekwoon, he has seen him laugh, he has listened to him speak about the sea and he can’t, he can’t, Hongbin is many things but he’s not a murderer, not even now in his hour of deepest need.

Taekwoon hears him let out a garbled sob and looks up, his face transforming into one of fear—and the fucking irony of him being afraid of Hongbin is too much, too much, and he swings the hatchet down and stops just in front of Taekwoon’s throat. “Fuck you,” he spits, anger pouring into him, red-hot and blinding. “ _Fuck_ you—”

“Hongbin,” Taekwoon murmurs, eyelashes stuck together with sparkling tears, hands held in the air. He looks so helpless. How can he be so helpless and yet a monstrosity all at once? “Put the axe down, please, let me explain—”

“You can’t explain this, you fucking monster,” Hongbin spits, hands trembling, axe trembling, body trembling. “You burnt the yacht—I’m _trapped_ here—”

“I didn’t want to—”

“What do you want to do, then?” Hongbin roars, his vision starting to go black and fuzzy around the edges. Taekwoon gets up on his knees, hands still held out in front of him, and Hongbin edges a step backwards. “Do you want to eat me? Burn me alive and listen to me scream? _What are you!”_

This last part is a shriek that reverbs around the cave, and Taekwoon cringes at the sound. “I promise, I don’t want to do any of that—”

Standing there, Hongbin realises two things at once. The first thing he realises is that he is doomed to stay on this island forever, doomed to die here with his only companion being a freak of nature that should not exist. The second is that the open side of the cave is at his back—a cool sea breeze strokes his shoulders, his neck, soothes his sweaty brow, and he knows at last what he must do.

“You won’t have me,” he whispers. The axe drops onto the sand. He takes a step backwards. “You can’t have me. You can never have me.”

Three steps and a leap and he’s over the edge, plummeting towards the sea below, returning to where he belongs at last.

 

***

 

The dragon follows. He falls over the edge after his prey, red-orange burning through him. Just like always the transformation is excruciating, his human tissue burning up from the inside out, and with a scream of pain he explodes and is gone and the dragon is brought forth, wings spreading to catch his fall.

But he is too late. He catches the human in his claws, tucking him close to his body, and then they both hit the surface of the water and are dragged below.

 

***

 

Demons smile up at him from the deep, beckoning him in with clawed hands—the faces of his crew are amongst them, grasping at him, _stay with us_ , they beg. He reaches for them, this is where he wants to be—in the deep where he knows he belongs, skeletons for company and mind and flesh picked raw by the ocean’s cruelty.

Instead, though, he is yanked backwards, away from their cold embrace and once more into the light.

He screams the whole time.

 

***

 

The rock against his face, the water lapping at his ankles—he heaves himself up onto his knees and does not know whether to laugh or cry.

He is right back where he started, lying on a dead dragon’s wing, doomed to return here for the rest of his days.

Slowly, tiredly, he looks around and realises Taekwoon is lying on the rock next to him, naked and human once more and looking very small indeed. He’s unconscious, or pretending to be, and Hongbin idly considers breaking his neck, or choking him to death. It would be easy.

But still, even now, he is not a murderer.

He gets to his feet and begins the now-familiar trek back up to his cave, wrapping his arms around himself. He’s shivering horribly, although it has nothing to do with the temperature; he wants nothing more to be free of this horrible place and yet no matter what he does, always finds himself back here again. Did he die when _Drachen_ sunk? Is this Hell?

He’s too tired to think, too tired to care. He takes off his wet clothes and slips under the warmth of his blanket, blocking out the sun and closing his eyes and wishing for death.

 

***

 

He doesn’t know how long he spends there, huddled under his blanket and crying. He’s never considered himself much of a crier, especially as an adult; there’s just not a lot that brings tears to his eyes. Being at sea, too, means one must be resilient, adaptable, dependable in a crisis. To see your captain crying when you needed him most would be unacceptable. But now he’s crying all the tears in the world, unable to stop. He’s weeping for himself, for his crew, for doomed _Drachen_ , for the island, for Taekwoon, for _Escape_ , but most of all he’s weeping because he knows he’s stuck here for the rest of his life, and that is a punishment worse than death. His brain isn’t even trying to process what he’s seen. It can’t, so it doesn’t. He just cries and cries and cries, getting up to drink water but unable to stomach the thought of food, waking at strange times of the day and night.

Jumping off the spire didn’t work, but there’s other ways to die at one’s own hand, he knows. When he thinks of them, though, not faced with the horrors of the island and not cornered, he shies away from them, although he doesn’t know why. It’s not like he has hope. That has been cauterised away from him like dead flesh he did not even know he needed. But he stares at the knife for the longest time and can’t bring himself to reach for its handle. He isn’t a murderer. He cannot kill himself.

One morning, he wakes and stares at the ceiling of his cave and realises that for the first time in a while he’s not woken up crying. That feels like progress, and when he sits up, his head spins and he feels hungry. Definitely progress, although towards what he’s not sure. He makes his way to the spring on shaky legs, slipping into the water and leaning against the rock, eating fruit as he tries to relax. The view from the spring is slightly different to the one in his cave—that faces east, whereas this faces north, meaning he has a great view of the spine of the massive creature.

No. Not a creature. A dragon. The size of it is utterly mind boggling—he must be twenty stories up at _least_ , and this isn’t even the top of the spire-skull; he wonders how such a creature even got off the ground. Its wingspan must have been monumental, and when he swims to the lip of the spring and looks out over the edge with this new knowledge, he can see that the little satellite islands off to the northeast are actually its wing bones, long and thin and barely above the surface of the water. A kilometre wingspan at least. He shivers, and swims away from the edge.

It’s safe here. The spring water is warm, and he’s surrounded by nothing but trees, swaying gently in the breeze and dappling the water with their shade. Perhaps that’s why he allows himself to think of what happened; he’s untouchable here. He still can’t really comprehend it, though. It doesn’t make sense. They’d touched, the first time their skin had touched without clothing in the way, and then Taekwoon had… transformed. His skin had turned red-orange, spreading from the centre of his chest out to his limbs, a spiderweb pattern that Hongbin didn’t recognise. His eyes had glowed too and then he’d, well, he’d exploded, for lack of a better word, into light, and when the light had faded there had been a dragon where he was standing.

A dragon. A fucking _dragon_.

He dips under the water of the spring and uses the soap to wash his hair and, once he returns to his cave, hacks at it with the knife somewhat frantically. It’s gotten too long for him to deal with and only once it’s back to being short does he feel remotely like himself again… which helps, somewhat. He carves a question mark on the wall—he’ll never get back the lost days spent under the blanket—and stares at the marks there for a long, long time, before picking up the knife and heading with determination upward.

His logic is paper-thin, but it’s all he’s got: if he’s destined to live here until he dies or kills himself, he may as well try and understand. If Taekwoon even hints that he’s going to transform into the dragon again, Hongbin will kill him. If he says that he’s going to kill Hongbin, Hongbin will kill him. But first he will listen, even if he suspects that what he’s about to hear will make no sense.

Taekwoon is cooking a fish over the fire when Hongbin appears, and for a moment, before Taekwoon spots him, he just stands in the mouth of the tunnel and watches. He wishes he could go back with a fierceness that surprises him. They were just getting used to each other, just carving out respect and—grudgingly, he can admit—admiration for one another, and now that that’s ripped away they’re back to being strangers once more. Not, he realises, that they were anything but strangers in the first place. Everything Taekwoon told him is no doubt a lie.

“I knew you weren’t Italian,” he announces flatly.

Taekwoon leaps in shock, whirling in that unnaturally fast way—his jerky, uncoordinated movements make sense now—and putting his hands up. Hongbin’s not brandishing the knife, although he is holding it at his side, and he wonders idly how different his life would be if he’d killed Taekwoon on the day they first met. He’d probably be home by now.

(It’s a testament to how much this island has changed him that he can think so casually about murdering someone.)

“Hongbin—”

“Listen,” Hongbin interrupts, taking a slow step forward, not raising the knife. “I think you owe me some answers. Some answers that aren’t lies. So why don’t we have lunch, and you can talk?” He uses the knife to gesture at the fish and Taekwoon cringes backwards, so he looks at it, turning the blade back and forth. “Sorry, but you’re the one who tried to kill me first. You’ll have to excuse me for taking precautions.”

He’s being cruel, he knows, especially since Taekwoon is cowering away from him. But he’s fucking terrified. He does not know how volatile the transformation is and needs to be prepared if the dragon suddenly emerges. Still. He has enough time to draw his knife if that happens, and so for Taekwoon’s sake, he sticks it back in his waistband.

It’s like some kind of fucking absurdist play, Hongbin and Taekwoon sitting down across the fire and sharing a fish, a washed-up merchant captain and the dragon he’s stuck with. The adrenaline pulsing through his system means the fish is utterly tasteless, but he forces it down, eyes on Taekwoon the whole time in case he starts glowing—he doesn’t. In fact, he looks miserable as he eats, curled in on himself in a way Hongbin’s not seen before. It’s almost pitiful, which Hongbin is wary of. Pity is the road to sympathy, and he’s not sure he’s ready to have sympathy for Taekwoon in the wake of all that’s happened.

“Start talking,” he says once they’re finished eating.

Taekwoon shakes his hair in front of his face and curls in even more, shoulders rounded in like a comma. “I don’t—I don’t know where to start. If you… ask anything, I will answer.” He looks up at Hongbin. “Truthfully.”

“What are you?”

“I am a dragon,” Taekwoon murmurs, but his accent gets heavier on the dragon—it almost sounds like he’s saying _drakon_ , rolling his Rs in a way that’s oddly pleasing to the ear. “There are not many of us left, these days. We used to be all over the world thousands of years ago… but things change. I am the only one in this hemisphere. Most choose to live at the poles. It’s safer for us there.”

Hongbin digests this information for a minute, although it’s difficult for him to swallow. “And… how does that work? I mean, you look human right now.” He shakes his head. “I just—this whole thing is just fucking absurd. Do mermaids exist too? Unicorns? The Loch Ness Monster?”

Taekwoon ducks his head, and if Hongbin’s eyes don’t deceive him, there’s a ghost of a smile on his lips. “I… cannot say. I was born dragon as you were born a human. I have never met a… mermaid. Or a unicorn. But then I don’t think unicorns can swim.” It’s a poor attempt at a joke, but when he looks up to find Hongbin stony-faced, his smile dies. “There is much in this world that humans don’t know about, or write off as myth. As for how it works… I was born into this body. The first transformation only occurs at puberty. It’s voluntary.”

Now that Taekwoon is talking more—in fact, this is the most he’s spoken at once in the entire time they’ve known each other—Hongbin can pick up on the complexities of his accent, and it’s most definitely not Italian. It’s nothing he’s heard before, but intriguing nonetheless. “So… this island is magic?”

“I suppose that’s one word for it. It is kept shielded from human eyes. It is effectively invisible, and anyone who tries to escape is… turned back…” Taekwoon trails off, seeing Hongbin’s expression change from a neutral one to one of horror, no doubt.

“Wait,” Hongbin snarls. “I was fixing that boat the whole time—and I wouldn’t have even made it? Those freak waves that came out of nowhere when I tried to escape on the dinghy—that was the _island_ keeping me here?”

Taekwoon nods, eyes sad, and Hongbin’s chest is so tight he can’t sit here, can’t sit here and listen to this bullshit, so he gets to his feet and starts pacing. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had fixed _Escape_. None of it would have mattered. He drives his fist into the nearest surface, which turns out to be the rotting wood of the broken ship, and he doubles over and howls with pain.

“Hongbin.” Taekwoon is right there, and then his hand is on Hongbin’s back, no doubt in a misguided attempt at comfort. But Hongbin sees red and stumbles backwards, holding his hand close to his chest, eyes wild with fear even though he’s wearing a shirt and they didn’t touch directly.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” he gasps.

At the harsh language, Taekwoon flinches, but he obligingly takes a step backwards. “I am sorry. Is your hand all right?”

The hand doesn’t matter. There’s so much rage and confusion bubbling up in him—frustrated doesn’t even begin to cover it, he’s a seething mass of turmoil and agitation, waiting for the spark to set him off. All he can do is stand there and glare, chest heaving, unable to even find words.

“I’m sorry,” Taekwoon says, straightening himself up and flicking his hair out of his eyes as if to try and underscore the seriousness of his words. “I never meant to—I never wanted you to see the dragon. I hate him as much as you do. And I was doing so well… I thought that you would somehow be able to get off the island and then I wouldn’t have to worry. But then we touched and—” He shakes his head, wringing his hands. “I am sorry, Hongbin. I never wanted to hurt you.”

This cuts through his rage somewhat, and he takes a deep breath in. “You… can’t control the dragon?”

Taekwoon shifts uncomfortably. His nails, Hongbin notes, are digging deep trenches into the flesh of his hand. “I—it’s complicated—”

“Tell me.”

“Only if you sit down.”

There it is, Taekwoon’s stubbornness again, and for a moment they both just stare at each other. Hongbin concedes first, edging his way over to the fire and kneeling by it, unfolding his hand from his chest to inspect the damage. He hasn’t broken it, thankfully. His knuckles are bleeding and bruised, but that will pass.

Taekwoon sits opposite Hongbin again, picking up a handful of sand and letting it run through his fingers. He’s quiet for a while before he speaks, and although Hongbin is impatient, even through his rage he can see how tormented Taekwoon is at this whole conversation.

“I did not want to be a dragon,” he whispers, so quietly Hongbin can barely hear him over the gentle crackling of the fire. “My mother raised me on this island, and of course I knew what I was from birth. But she made the mistake of letting me read the books that had washed up on the island over the years. I was… entranced by the idea of a human world. I wanted so badly to be human, as all children wish to be things they cannot. But when the time came for me to be a dragon, at puberty, I—I rejected it. I was too scared. My mother was disappointed, but she couldn’t force me, so she left it.

“One day when I was seventeen or so she was flying around—I think she was trying to catch birds—and I was sitting at the top of the, the skull, watching her as I usually did. I don’t know what went wrong. I still do not know. Maybe her wing caught a wave, I’m not sure. But she—she fell into the sea, and the sea is a dangerous place to be for a dragon. When we are fully grown we get very big, and our bulk drags us under.”

Hongbin is perfectly still, unable to move an inch. Taekwoon is still playing with the sand, but it’s more frantic now, like he can’t control it.

“She didn’t surface. I was watching for her and—and she did not come up. So I—I panicked and I did what I could not before, and I leapt off the edge and became a dragon.” Here he looks up at Hongbin with a wry, sad smile. “There is a reason we take our first flight under the watchful eyes of our mothers. It was awful. The transformation is… horribly painful, and I had to focus and get to her, and flying is instinctual but I was not good at it. I sunk beneath too, but panicked and transformed back to a human, and in the gloom of the sea I could not see her—” He puts his head in his hands. “Her body washed up two days later.”

Demons in the depths, reaching for them both—smiling snarling faces, dragon and human alike, and Hongbin shakes his head violently to clear the vision away. They are more similar than he realised, and although he is still enraged at Taekwoon, his heart breaks for him too. He almost reaches out a hand to touch, to comfort, before remembering, and laces his fingers together instead. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“That’s why I—I brought you back here when you tried to escape, in the little boat.” Taekwoon’s hands fall away from his face, and to Hongbin’s shock, he’s crying. “I couldn’t just let you drown—”

He is sinking beneath waves impossibly large, he is trapped in a tunnel drowning, each time plucked from the sea’s waiting embrace and brought back to the land of the living. Taekwoon has saved his life time and time again. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense. “Why did you try and kill me?” he blurts, because why would Taekwoon bring him to the surface over and over again only to try and kill him with fire? “I don’t understand—”

“I can’t control the dragon,” Taekwoon roars, his chest unfurling with glowing red, on his feet before Hongbin can react. “I can’t control him—I fight him every day—do you know what it’s like to fight your own nature?” He meets Hongbin’s eyes, glowing teary orange meeting brown, and Hongbin’s hand goes for the knife. “He wants to kill you.”

This isn’t Taekwoon’s voice anymore. It’s deeper, raspier, and Hongbin is helpless to do anything but watch as Taekwoon advances towards him across the sand, spiderwebs of glowing red pulsating through his body. “He wants to kill me,” Hongbin gasps, and gets to his feet, crouching, trying to show he’s not a threat. “But you don’t.”

That makes Taekwoon pause. Hongbin can see the war within him; he’s swaying on his feet, teeth gritted, but bit by bit the red from his eyes fades and dims, and when it diminishes entirely he falls to his knees. “I’m sorry,” he wails, and covers his face again.

For a long moment there’s silence broken only by Taekwoon’s sobs, and they are the sobs of the truly shattered—heart-wrenching, soul-tearing sobs, a being torn apart by its own nature. Maybe it’s this that makes Hongbin move. Maybe it’s Taekwoon’s story about his mother. Maybe it’s the insanity this island has driven him to. But he approaches Taekwoon and kneels in front of him in the sand and draws him into a hug, pulling him close and holding him tight. Taekwoon’s arms wrap around his waist and he buries his head in Hongbin’s shoulder, and for the longest time that is how they remain, rocking gently back and forth on the sand.

 

***

 

For a blissful moment after he wakes, he thinks that he’s back where he was a week ago—he’ll work on the sail, they’ll eat some fish for dinner, and he’ll attempt to make conversation that will go nowhere. It’s not until he sits up and sees the question mark on the wall— _twenty-eight, twenty-nine, ?_ —that he remembers, and he remembers Taekwoon’s story yesterday, and a shudder runs through him.

He finds himself strangely listless without a task to keep his hands busy, without a goal to work towards. He bathes in the spring and folds his clothes. He even makes his bed—which is little more than a pile of sheets with the blanket on top—and tidies his pitiful collection of belongings. That doesn’t take more than an half an hour. He sits and whittles for a while, working on the beginnings of a little wood carving of a dragon, but when he gets hungry he puts it aside and goes to pick some fruit, deliberately walking as slow as possible to make time drag.

It doesn’t take him very long to give up the pretense and make his way upwards to Taekwoon’s cave, hovering in the mouth of the cave and sighing in relief when he spots Taekwoon with an armful of driftwood, presumably to stoke the fire. “Hey.”

“Hello.” Taekwoon puts the driftwood down and settles his hands on his hips. He’s back to being shirtless, meaning there’s an awful lot of skin on show—skin that’s dangerous, skin that if touched has awful consequences.

“I was wondering,” Hongbin says, suddenly wondering why on earth he feels so awkward, “if I could borrow a book?”

Taekwoon blinks, as if taken aback at the question, but he nods. “Of course,” he murmurs, and makes his way over to the other of his two chests, the one Hongbin hasn’t seen him open before. “Here.”

He lifts the lid and Hongbin is taken aback at just how many books are in there—the chest is practically overflowing with them, and he kneels in front of the chest and runs his fingers over the warped spines in wonder. He would have taken all this for granted, before. Now it’s treasure. There’s all sorts of books in there; young adult fiction, ancient-looking tomes with peeling spines, even an English dictionary. “Is this how you learnt English?”

“Yes. I read a lot and used the dictionary. I know my pronunciation is off, but I’ve—I’ve never had anyone to practice with before.”

His English has been getting better the more they’ve spoken; he now sounds quite natural, albeit still accented, whereas in the beginning it was very stilted. But this isn’t the fact that amazes Hongbin. He picks up the dictionary as an excuse to avoid looking in Taekwoon’s eyes and flicks it open to a random page, reading the first entry there: _Fate: the development of events beyond a person's control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power._ “Am I the first human you’ve met?”

“Yes,” Taekwoon murmurs, and when Hongbin looks up he can see that the tips of Taekwoon’s ears are turning red with a blush. “The island is hidden. No one would come here by choice except for another dragon. I was very afraid when the sea brought you to me.”

He puts the dictionary back and grabs the book next to it, a sci-fi novel by the looks of it. “Afraid?”

Taekwoon is quiet for a long while. Hongbin can practically hear the wheels turning in his head, feel him mulling over his words, but he doesn’t force it. He just continues to go through the books, looking at the blurbs and glancing at the covers to try and find one that sounds interesting.

“I did not know… if I would be able to keep the dragon hidden.” At this, Hongbin looks up, but there’s no hint of red on Taekwoon’s chest or in his eyes. “I did not know if I would be able to control myself. I could not reveal what I was… that is sacrosanct, to keep ourselves secret. Humans used to kill us long ago. But I was also afraid of having company. I have been alone for a long time now.”

Even though he told himself he wouldn’t, even though he knows he shouldn’t, Hongbin’s heart twinges with sympathy for Taekwoon. He knows how lonely it was, alone on this dreadful place. To spend years like that… “Well, you were doing well until we touched,” he says, trying to be cheery about it. “That was my fault.”

“I don’t know why touch triggers the change,” Taekwoon hums, very slowly reaching out a hand to hover over Hongbin’s arm. They’re not touching, but Hongbin can feel the unnatural heat from Taekwoon’s body, and sees the beginning of a glow start up in Taekwoon’s chest. “I don’t… really know what does.”

“You don’t know what makes you change into the dragon?”

Taekwoon takes his hand away and the glow fades instantly. “No. I hate being a dragon. If I could turn back time I never would have become one. Whenever he comes out I—I hide in the crevice. It’s too big for him to get out of, so he’s trapped.”

Hongbin is silent for a while. That certainly explains the ash in the crevice, but he feels so awful for Taekwoon that he doesn’t really know what to say. To hate part of your own nature like that… It seems like a terrible way to live. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, goes to pat Taekwoon’s arm and reconsiders, patting his clothed knee instead. “I didn’t mean to fuck up your life, Taekwoon.”

Their eyes meet and for a moment it looks like Taekwoon wants to say something—but then he looks away and smiles, but it’s rather grim. “You haven’t,” he says, and then stands up. “Take whichever books you like.”

It’s a dismissal, and Hongbin takes it as such, selecting a few titles that look good and gathering them in his arms. He wants to say something before he leaves, something to break the pregnant silence between them, but his words fail him and all he can muster is a quiet, “Thanks for the books,” before disappearing down the tunnel again.

 

***

 

He tries to stay away from Taekwoon after that, not out of concern for his own safety—which is odd, but he rationalises it by remembering that they spent a good three weeks together with no dragon incidents to speak of—but out of concern for Taekwoon’s mental health. Now that there’s no more secrets between them, Hongbin is seeing who Taekwoon really is, and it’s clear that he has so much pain inside him it’s tearing him apart. As far as Hongbin can tell, he’s only making it worse. Maybe it’s better for the both of them if he keeps his distance.

So he reads the books he’s borrowed, and he carves lines on the wall as the days go by, and he eats and sleeps and dreams and he feels empty. The more he loses himself in the fictional worlds depicted in the novels, the more melancholy and lifeless he becomes. He misses reality. He misses being at sea, he misses the convenience of modern life, he misses his friends and he misses his hometown by the ocean—he misses all of it, and the thought that he will never get to see any of it again slowly drives him into a deep depression the likes of which he’s never felt before.

The hopelessness of his situation is bleak and impassable. If he tries to leave, the sea will return him here. If he tries to die—at least by falling—the dragon will catch him. He wants nothing more than to close his eyes and wake up on his bed aboard _Drachen_ or, even better, back on dry land—but no matter how many times he tries he just wakes up to the familiar unfamiliarity of the island and his little cave.

He knows he’s gotten really bad when he stops bothering to count the days.

He finishes the books and idly contemplates going to ask to borrow some more, but dismisses the thought instantly. Taekwoon is volatile, and he’s hurting, and there’s nothing more dangerous than an animal that’s in pain and thinks it’s cornered. Hongbin is just being self-seeking by staying away. It’s self-seeking by ceasing to eat, too. The faster he brings about his own demise the sooner he can sink beneath the waves and join his crew where he belongs, his soul doomed to wander the oceans for the rest of eternity.

He doesn’t, however, count on Taekwoon.

“Hongbin?”

A quiet voice wakes him from sleep—he doesn’t know the time, but it doesn’t matter; he sleeps all the time anyway. It’s daylight at least. “Hmm?”

Taekwoon is crouching over him, eyebrows drawn together in concern, and Hongbin wakes up quick-smart and scoots away in fear. “What?”

“Are you… alright?” When Hongbin doesn’t reply, Taekwoon looks pointedly around. “It’s been two weeks. I got worried. And it seems I had reason to be…”

Hongbin reaches for his blanket and pulls it over his head. “Fuck off.”

It’s futile, because Taekwoon—as Hongbin suspected he wouldn’t—does not fuck off. Instead he picks Hongbin up, blanket and all, and begins walking. Hongbin shrieks and kicks and spits like something feral, but with how weak he is it has little effect. Taekwoon doesn’t even falter. Hongbin gets the blanket off his head and goes to smack Taekwoon across the face, but hesitates at the last second. They can’t touch or else the dragon will come out… That only makes him more frustrated, and he shoves ineffectively at Taekwoon’s chest. “Let me _go_ , you bastard—”

“No,” Taekwoon says, looking down at Hongbin with a smile that appears more like a smirk in Hongbin’s enraged state. “You have clearly lost your mind.”

And then he dumps Hongbin in the spring.

The water seeps through the hunger and the sorrow clouding his thoughts, and he stands up and screams—petulance or rage, who can tell—in frustration, his clothes dripping wet. Taekwoon disappears and reappears in a flash with the hand mirror, and when he holds it up, casting Hongbin’s reflection back at himself, Hongbin smacks it out of his hand. He looks awful. His hair is hanging in his eyes again, limp and dank, and the beginning of the beard he’s growing is revolting. That’s not even mentioning the way his face has sunk in on itself, although that’s more out of grief than any nutritional deficit.

He looks like a dead man walking, and it frightens him.

“What do you _want?”_

Taekwoon folds his arms over his chest. “For you to live.”

The anger burns through him, firing through his synapses and searing his nerves. All he can do is stand in the water and pant, chest heaving—he doesn’t even know what to say, doesn’t know how to begin deciphering the mess their lives have become since he washed up on this godforsaken island. “And what does the dragon want?”

Hurt flashes across Taekwoon’s face, brief and blinding, before he schools his features into a blank mask. “You know what he wants.”

“Then let him have it!” he roars, falling to his knees. The water of the spring comes up to his chest, and he spreads his arms and tips his head back. “Let him have me. I want no part in this stupid game anymore.”

It doesn’t escape him that he was willing to fling himself into the void simply to escape the dragon’s clutches a mere two weeks ago—but that was when he burned with the fire of defiance. No fire burns in him now. He’s an empty shell of hopelessness and despondence. It’s pointless, it’s all pointless, and the sooner he dies the sooner the suffering ends.

“Don’t,” Taekwoon hisses, stumbling backwards. His chest flares red underneath his shirt, and he starts trembling all over like a livewire—it’s fascinating to watch in a way. “Don’t say that.”

“Why?” Hongbin leans over the edge of the spring, forcing Taekwoon backwards. “Is he listening? Does he hear?”

“Don’t torture me like this!” Taekwoon begs, his voice distorting hideously midway through the sentence—he takes a staggered step forward, towards Hongbin, but it’s clear he has no control over it. “Please. You don’t know how much it hurts—”

It’s this that cuts through Hongbin’s insanity and makes him pause, and he stills in the water. It’s not that he’s afraid for himself. The best part of his fear was burnt away that day he spent in the crevice. It’s more that he’s afraid for Taekwoon. The pain in his voice is evident; his eyes are full of it, and moving more on instinct than any rational thought, he grabs Taekwoon by the wrist and pulls him headfirst into the spring.

“Hongbin!” Taekwoon gasps, but it’s a very human noise, and when he gets to his feet and wipes his eyes they are no longer glowing. “What did you do that for—”

But Hongbin’s not concerned with a petty argument anymore. Instead he’s staring at where they’re touching, his fingers wrapped around Taekwoon’s bare wrist in the water, and even though Taekwoon’s skin is almost unbearably warm they’re really touching. He can scarcely believe it. “Taekwoon,” he interrupts, and shakes Taekwoon’s wrist a little. “Look.”

Taekwoon does, and when he sees that Hongbin’s still got him by the wrist, he jerks himself violently backwards in an attempt to free himself—but it backfires because Hongbin holds on, and then they’re both falling over. They end up in a messy tangle, Hongbin laying on Taekwoon’s chest, faces close together. More importantly, though, they’re touching; he can feel the heat of Taekwoon’s body all over, along his arms, the back of his neck, his feet.

They’re touching, and Taekwoon isn’t glowing.

“Don’t—move—” Taekwoon breathes, eyes wide, and he begins to attempt to extricate himself. “Just stay still.”

“You don’t get it,” Hongbin huffs, and sits up of his own accord, disentangling himself from Taekwoon’s grasp. “Look.”

To hammer his point home, he leans forward and cups Taekwoon’s face in his hands. His skin is soft and smooth and warm, and he’s almost sorry when Taekwoon rears backwards. “Hongbin!” he scolds, but he looks down at himself as if to confirm. “Why…”

He’s made his point, so he settles on the opposite side of the spring to Taekwoon, folding his arms over his chest. The urge to keep touching Taekwoon is almost unbearable, simply because he is starving for the simple need of human touch, but Taekwoon is spooked enough. “I think it’s the water. Maybe it’s… nullifying the dragon? Soothing him?” he suggests, flicking his hair away from his eyes.

“Perhaps,” Taekwoon murmurs, staring at his hands like he’s not even sure they’re his own. “But… I have never heard of anything like this…” He looks back up at Hongbin, eyes wild. “Touch me again.”

A shiver runs down Hongbin’s spine at the command, and somewhat helplessly he shuffles closer, reaching out a dripping hand to lay it on the closest bit of exposed skin, which is the hollow of Taekwoon’s collarbone. Nothing happens, nothing at all beyond Taekwoon’s little gasp—Hongbin looks at him worriedly, but his eyes are still reassuring brown. “You don’t feel the dragon? Not even a little bit?”

“He is always with me,” Taekwoon murmurs, and then before Hongbin can move he flops forward onto Hongbin’s chest. Somewhat automatically, Hongbin’s arms come around him to hold him close. “But he is quiet now.”

And so quiet they remain. Taekwoon’s hand sneaks around his back, up his shirt, and his touch is so warm that Hongbin finds himself drifting off in the comfort of the water. He can hear nothing but the breeze rustling the leaves of the trees and Taekwoon’s quiet breaths, and it’s unbelievably peaceful. He does not think about what this means for the both of them moving forward. He doesn’t want to. They just sit, drinking it all in, allowing themselves the small luxury of touch, something they both have been desperately deprived of.

 

***

 

“I’m sick of this,” he says, marching right into Taekwoon’s cave.

Whatever happened between them yesterday in the spring has shocked him out of his stupor. He woke up this morning and started counting the days once more, shaved and ate and cut his hair again, and is now standing over Taekwoon with his hands over his hips.

Taekwoon, for his part, isn’t out of bed. He’s lying underneath a thin blanket, squinting sleepily at Hongbin, and when he sits up Hongbin can see he’s not wearing a shirt. “Of what?”

“This!” He gestures at the bareness of the cave around him. “You’ve lived here your entire life and you’ve never thought to decorate?”

Sleepily, Taekwoon rubs his eyes. “You want to decorate _here?”_

“Not here. My cave. My room. My—you know what I mean.” When Taekwoon doesn’t react, he nudges him with his foot, through the blanket. “And I need your help. Living in a bare cave is driving me crazy.”

“Are you an indoors decorator now?”

“Interior decorator,” Hongbin corrects, taking a few steps back as Taekwoon gets up and stretches, revealing an awful lot of tanned, faintly-muscled skin. Skin that’s off-limits to touch unless they’re in water, he reminds himself. Not that he wants to touch Taekwoon’s chest regardless. Anyway. Tangent. “And no, but now I don’t have the sails everywhere it just looks very empty. Surely there’s stuff around that I can use to decorate.”

Taekwoon shrugs. “I mean, there is plenty of stuff in the caves…”

“Let’s go then.”

But Taekwoon takes his time waking up. He fetches himself a shirt and then eats fruit, wandering around his cave aimlessly. Hongbin, who is full of a weird nervous energy, can do nothing but sit and watch while whittling away on the dragon he’s carving. Taekwoon keeps glancing at it, but he doesn’t say anything until he’s finally ready, and comes to a stop in front of Hongbin. “All right,” he murmurs. “Let’s go.”

They make their way back down into the depths of the skull, Hongbin following in Taekwoon’s footsteps and trying to ignore the way his heart is racing. He hasn’t been down here since that horrible day he spent in the crevice, and even though it all looks the same once they spill out into the cavern, he keeps glancing around like the dragon is going to jump out from behind a rock.

“So, the island,” he says in an effort to distract himself, “it’s a dragon, right?”

Taekwoon nods. “My great ancestor.”

“It’s huge.”

Another nod. “Yes. I believe this is the biggest example of our species… we get large, normally, but not this large.”

“And you?”

Taekwoon’s size in dragon form was hard to judge—Hongbin was blind with panic in the cave, and then when he was falling, he can remember nothing but shapes. The dragon is big, certainly, larger than him and large enough to be intimidating. But not enormous. Nowhere near the size of the dragon that died to create this island.

“I am about…” Taekwoon falls silent, obviously calculating. “Forty feet long? Approximately, including my tail. My wingspan is probably about the same. Dragons are pretty… square.”

A forty foot wingspan… While it doesn’t come close to the wingspan the dragon of the island had, it’s still nothing to sniff at. Part of Hongbin wants to see the dragon again just to get a picture for how big he is exactly, but the rest of him recoils in fear at the very idea. It’s relatively easy to deal with the fact that part of Taekwoon, a part of him that is core to who he is, wants to kill him. It was less easy to do that when Taekwoon was nowhere to be found and he was facing a monster.

The thought of that unsettles him, and for the rest of the walk through the cavern he’s silent. They walk straight past the entrance to the tunnel leading to where _Escape_ was, and he shivers at the sight of it but is glad they don’t go down—he’s not sure he’ll ever be ready to see that destruction again, given that it just hammers home the hopelessness that’s always lurking in the back of his mind.

Instead, Taekwoon takes them down a tunnel Hongbin didn’t notice before; it goes down for so long that Hongbin feels like they’re descending into the very centre of the earth, which he knows is absurd but, then, so are dragons. When the tunnel finally opens out, though, it’s into a large cave—or at least he thinks it is from what he can work out in the gloom. “I can’t see anything,” he murmurs, putting his hands on Taekwoon’s shoulders so they don’t get separated. “Do you have a lamp or something?”

Taekwoon snorts. “Is human eyesight really that pitiful?” Before Hongbin can react, he slips away. “Wait there. I’ll find something.”

He can just see Taekwoon moving around in the gloom, hear the sounds of wood creaking, and it seems like the longest time before there’s the flare of a match and then an old-fashioned oil lamp is lit, revealing Taekwoon’s shadowed face and not much more. “Here,” he murmurs, handing it to Hongbin, being careful not to let their fingers touch. “This is where I… store things.”

Hongbin starts to wander around the cave, holding the lamp out in front of him to be able to see. As far as he can tell, it’s just crates upon crates, some with the lids off, others still sealed. There’s even a shipping container in one corner, its metal door swinging open eerily. When he opens one crate—with Taekwoon’s help—he finds that it’s full of books, the same book, actually, a young adult novel. “Did you take one of these upstairs?” he asks, pulling out one from the pile and flipping it over to reveal that it’s been ruined by water.

“Yes. This is the book section. Most of the crates here are just full of books.”

Hongbin shoots him a glance, eyebrow raised. “You organise your storage cave but still sleep in a bare room?”

“This is logistical.” Taekwoon shrugs. “And life by yourself is boring. Before you arrived I did nothing but fish and read. Reorganising the cave every so often was just something to do to keep myself busy.”

He doesn’t argue any further. It seems pointless. Instead he just moves over to the next section and starts going through the crates there, Taekwoon holding the lamp for him. Slowly and methodically he works his way through the whole of the cave, pulling lids off crates and replacing them one by one, and listening to Taekwoon’s stories about each one (“this one washed up a few years ago, I think…” “this one I never bothered opening…” “this one has an interesting design”). He starts a collection of useful things as he goes, and by the time he’s finished he is dusty and exhausted and his rib is twinging—which is interesting, because it hasn’t been giving him grief for a while—but more importantly he’s standing by a pile of things. Useful things, if not simply for the fact that they will brighten up his cave. There’s a few rugs, pillows—actual feather pillows!—and sheets and even a ruined painting or two. The shipping lane that _Drachen_ was in when she sunk, which is presumably not far from here, is one of the busiest in the world; if this island is as much of a ship magnet as it seems, it makes sense as to how much stuff has washed up over time.

Time, though, plays on his mind as they carry the stuff back up the spire, taking several trips to bring everything. He has only been keeping track thanks to his lines on the wall, but even that isn’t accurate. Time seems to move differently on this island. He can’t tell if that’s his own delusion or more of the island’s magic, and doubts he has any way to find out. Instead, once they’ve done their last trip, he dumps the rug he was dragging on the sand and puts his hands on his hips. “How old are you?”

Taekwoon looks up in surprise. “I—what made you ask that?”

“No reason.” When he doesn’t elaborate, Hongbin shrugs. “I’m twenty six.”

There’s a long silence, Taekwoon doing nothing but fiddling with the tassels on one of the rugs and staring off into space. “Would you believe I don’t know?” he murmurs, finally meeting Hongbin’s eyes again. “My mother always celebrated my birthday with me, but when she was gone I… we didn’t have calendars. She just always knew. If I had to guess… I am probably close to forty or fifty.”

“What!” Hongbin squawks. “Forty or _fifty?”_

“What’s wrong with that?”

Hongbin shakes his head and then starts laughing. It’s all he can do. He can’t cry anymore; he’s cried out everything he is and everything he has. Laughter at the absurdity is all that’s left and so he laughs, laughs until he’s tearing up. “It’s just,” he gets out, “fuck,” he tries, “Taekwoon—you look about twenty five, there’s no way you’re fifty—”

The startled look on Taekwoon’s face only makes the situation that more ridiculous, and Hongbin actually falls over with laughter—but that’s alright, because then Taekwoon is laughing on the ground next to him, and what they’re laughing about doesn’t even seem important. Taekwoon’s face does, creased up in mirth, smiling widely. It’s more than pretty—it’s beautiful, he’s beautiful, and Hongbin just basks in the knowledge of that fact rather than trying to question it.

 

***

 

After they get over their laughing fit and have lunch of fish and fruit, Hongbin instructs Taekwoon to bring the rugs and together they make their way down to sea level, Hongbin leading this time. He marches them along the dragon’s spine to the beach they swam at before, rolls up his pant legs and takes off his shirt, and wades into the water with the rug in hand.

“What are you doing?” Taekwoon calls, dithering on the sand with a rug still in his arms.

Hongbin unrolls the rug with a snap and lets it settle on the water’s surface. “Washing it, of course.” When Taekwoon still doesn’t join him, he gestures impatiently. “Come on. I can’t do this by myself.”

Obligingly, Taekwoon slips into the water and takes the other end of the rug. Moving together—albeit disjointedly at first—they swish it underwater and snap it back up into the air again, over and over in an attempt to get the dirt and dust off. It’s hard work, especially since the sun is baking down over them both, but after they finish one the difference in colour is satisfying enough that they immediately move on to the next one. The rugs are heavy even when they’re dry; when they’re waterlogged they’re almost impossible to carry, and after a while Hongbin’s shoulders start getting tired, but still he perseveres. Once they’re all finished, they carry the rugs onto rocks nearby to dry before collapsing onto the sand next to each other, lying close but not saying anything, the sea kissing their ankles.

For an abhorrent place that he never would have come to voluntarily, the island does seem peaceful in moments like this. He closes his eyes and listens to the noise of the water lapping gently at the shore, to the sound of his own heartbeat, and basks in this small moment of serenity. That is, until, Taekwoon’s hand slips into his own. “Don’t move,” Taekwoon whispers, and Hongbin freezes.

When he opens his eyes the sight that he’s confronted with is terrifying and awful. Taekwoon is sitting up, his whole body pulsating and glowing red; as Hongbin watches in horror, his shirt quite literally burns away into nothing, the red glowing nearly so bright he can barely stand to watch. “Taekwoon,” he whispers, and when their eyes meet it takes every part of him not to recoil in fear. “The water…”

“I want,” Taekwoon rumbles, his voice deep and rasping, “I want to see if I can—if I can control it—”

But his body twists and contorts, and Hongbin moves without thinking. Some base part of him knows that if the dragon comes out he will die. Taekwoon has no desire to kill him; the dragon does, and he can’t reason with the dragon. He’s up on his feet and pulling Taekwoon into the water. He resists, but Hongbin pulls with all his strength, and he follows; he doesn’t stop pulling until they’re in water up to their necks and the glow fades, leaving nothing but Taekwoon, teary-eyed and open-mouthed.

“I’m sorry,” he gasps, and then pulls Hongbin in for a hug. His head is buried in the crook of Hongbin’s shoulder, so he feels rather than hears the next words that Taekwoon speaks: “I don’t want to hurt you.”

There’s so much of Taekwoon pressed up against him—even though they’re in the water, the heat of his body is impossible to ignore, and he sinks into it as he wraps both arms around Taekwoon and holds onto him as if he’s an anchor. Perhaps he is, in a way. Sometimes, like now, he feels as if he is drowning once again, and he is not quite sure why. “You won’t,” he whispers into the skin of Taekwoon’s shoulder, his lips seared with Taekwoon’s warmth.

He’s not sure how long they remain like that. He’s not sure he even cares. His world is reduced to the heavy weight of Taekwoon in his arms, and perhaps he should be afraid. Instead he is anything but. He is soothed, the both of them are, and once more he feels peace.


	3. Chapter 3

They postpone the rest of the decorating until the next day, mainly because they stay in the water until sunset before parting ways. When he drifts off to sleep that night he can almost still feel Taekwoon in his arms, an imprint branded into him, and for the first time since he washed up on the first day he does not dream of _Drachen_ sinking into the deep.

He does not know what it means.

Taekwoon appears mid-morning, bringing with him the rolled rugs, and he places them on the sand delicately. “Where do you want these?”

Hongbin hums, looking about his space. “I’m thinking of constructing a sort of lean-to, actually, so just leave them where they are for now. I did it once when I had the sails here, to protect from the wind and rain when there was a storm. I think it’d be a good way to partially enclose the space and keep the weather out.” Sleeping exposed to the elements is nice if the weather is good, but he’s wary of more rain, or it getting cold.

“What do you need?”

At once his mind goes to the wrecked ship in Taekwoon’s cave. “If I had something like the mast of the ship in your cave, I could prop it up against the wall. That’s large enough… but I don’t know how to get it here.”

They fall silent, both ruminating in their own heads as they sit together. After a while, Taekwoon shakes his head, lips in a thin line. “I have one idea, but… No. It its stupid. We will have to drag it down here by hand.”

“What’s your idea?” Hongbin asks idly, more out of a desire to avoid that much manual labour than any real curiosity.

“The… No.”

It’s only now that Hongbin’s concern is piqued, and he sits up a little straighter. “No, tell me.”

Taekwoon looks away, chewing on his lip. “The dragon could bring it down here easily.”

A shiver of fear runs down his spine, and it’s this that makes his first instinctual reaction a visceral negative one. But he hesitates, and in the hesitation creeps his curiosity, and his intrigue, and just a little bit of each is enough to stop the words falling from his mouth. He gathers a handful of sand and lets it run through his fingers, focusing on the feeling in an attempt to ground himself. “That could work,” he says, deliberately keeping his tone light. “How would you… he… how would you do it?”

“Both caves are open to the elements. Not large enough for me to fit in all the way, but large enough for me to get a large portion of my body into at least. To grab the mast and bring it down here would be easy.” Taekwoon looks up, expression deadly serious. “But you would need to hide yourself. I can control the dragon for that long, long enough to do it, but only if I don’t catch sight of you. Otherwise he will take over.”

He doesn’t know what possesses him to say yes. He is terribly afraid of the dragon, after all; he wants nothing to do with it and he certainly doesn’t want to see it again. Or so he thinks. Apparently some part of him does, because he nods before he really knows what he’s doing. “Let’s do it,” he says, voice confident and unwavering.

Together they devise the plan, and it’s quite a simple one. Taekwoon will transform into the dragon, fly up to his cave, grab the mast in his mouth, bring it down to Hongbin’s cave, deposit it, and transform back into human form. Hongbin will be hiding out of sight on the path leading to the spring.

On paper it makes sense, is logical even, but Hongbin’s hands are shaking and he can see the nervousness on Taekwoon’s face. Maybe it’s a stupid idea after all. Maybe they should just do the hard work of dragging the mast through the tunnels—all the way to the bottom and then back up to the top, because it won’t fit through the switchback shortcut. But Hongbin’s curiosity prevents him from putting a stop to things, and before he knows it he’s waiting on the path to the spring, flattened against the rock with his heart hammering in his chest.

For the longest time there’s silence. It’s just him and the wind, a comforting breeze caressing his face as he stands there and trembles. In fact it goes on for so long that he thinks that maybe Taekwoon’s backed out, that they’ll have to do it by hand. He’s just about to move to go inside when he hears it, a strange sound and one that doesn’t belong in the tranquility of the outside of the spire: wings, beating against the air, _whoosh whoosh whoosh._

Before he knows what he’s doing, he sidles to the side and carefully, carefully, sticks his head around to peer inside, praying he’ll stay out of sight and hidden. He has no idea what he’s going to see. He can barely even remember what the dragon looks like, after all; all he can remember is fire and teeth and glowing red.

What he sees, however, is nothing like that.

The dragon is hovering in front of his cave, enormous wings beating the air—the source of the _whooshes_. It’s got the mast in its mouth, the remnants of the tattered sail barely clinging on, and as Hongbin watches with wide eyes and his heart in his throat, it lands on the rock, wings leaving imprints on the sand, enormous claws digging into the rock on the edge of the cliff. It drops the mast with no care and blinks, and Hongbin forgets how to breathe.

He doesn’t even know how to describe it. It’s terrifying but also beautiful, in a savage way; its head reminds him of a drawing of a tyrannosaurus rex he saw in a book once, only the dragon has numerous horny appendages along its head extending backwards, the largest of which are two that curve ever so slightly. It is a nondescript brown colour, its wings darkening to black, and he can see that its eyes are not glowing at all like they were the last time he saw them. Instead they are a dull yellow. It’s the strangest, most foreign and monstrous thing he has ever seen, and he is instantly intrigued even as his fear paralyses him. The dragon is _huge_ , big enough to eat him easily; big enough to eat two or three of him easily if it so desired. Even so there’s that strange savage beauty about it, like he’s viewing something impossibly rare and ancient, and he stays pinned there as the dragon shuffles back and drops off the edge of the rock.

He’s moving before he really knows what he’s doing, scrambling over the sand and leaping over the mast to watch as it soars away, dipping over the water. In flight it moves with a grace that belies its size, sailing with ease, and Hongbin’s fear is completely forgotten. Instead he’s rapt, eyes wide in wonder as the dragon lands on the rock below, right where he washed up. Its chest begins to glow—even from up here he can see how its eyes turn red—and then it simply disappears into a shower of bright embers, and when Hongbin blinks he can see Taekwoon is standing where the dragon was, completely naked with wild hair and glowing eyes.

The wind, just a gentle breeze, brings a still-glowing ember up to him, and he opens his fist and watches in quiet awe as the ember settles on his palm, burning brightly for a moment before flaring away into nothing.

 

***

 

He doesn’t tell Taekwoon about seeing him in dragon form, especially after they agreed he’d stay out of sight; he feels as if he’s done something wrong, and doesn’t want Taekwoon to get angry with him. Instead, once he appears wearing clothes and looking normal once more, he produces the two needles they were using on _Escape_ ’s sail and brandishes them with a flourish.

“More sewing?” Taekwoon mutters, taking a needle dejectedly.

“Yes, although it won’t take us that long, this time.” Hongbin points at the mast, and then at the pile of fabric at his feet—a mass of sheets and blankets, mismatched and patchwork. “We sew these together and attach them to the mast with rope. Then we prop it up against the wall and stretch the fabric out, and it will make a… tent of sorts.” When Taekwoon looks at him skeptically, he taps his forehead. “Don’t worry. I have it all in here.”

And so that is exactly what they do. They sew quickly and quietly; it’s a simple task to stitch everything together, especially since it doesn’t need to be very sturdy, just enough to do the job. Once it’s done the huge square of fabric looks a bit silly with how dissimilar it is to itself, but Hongbin’s already warmed to it. It looks a bit like a demented patchwork quilt, and so he’s humming happily to himself as they lash it to the mast—not how one would attach a sail but rather all along its length, as if it were a particularly oversized banner or flag.

Positioning the mast is easy enough—Taekwoon is absurdly strong, even in human form, and so he can pick it up and lean it against the wall at 45 degrees easily enough—but the harder part comes in stringing it up. To run a rope from the opposite end of the mast up to the rock is fine, but what to attach it to?

“If I had a—a loop of metal,” Hongbin says, gesturing with his hands to illustrate, “and we could hammer it into the rock somehow, that could do.”

He doesn’t really know why he says it; it’s not like he expects Taekwoon to have random bits of metal lying around. But he brightens and nods excitedly, disappears back down the tunnel, and returns twenty minutes later bearing the rustiest, oldest looking mooring ring Hongbin has ever seen, and a hammer to go with.

“What don’t you have on this island?” he murmurs, turning the hammer over in his hands in wonder.

Taekwoon snorts. “Electricity?”

“Well, yes,” Hongbin concedes, wistfully thinking of the simplicity of electric lights.

They bicker—albeit playfully—about the best way to go about the hammering. Neither of them are tall enough to reach the height they need, even if they use Hongbin’s wooden chest as a stepping stone, and so eventually settle on Hongbin sitting on Taekwoon’s shoulders.

It’s absurd. It’s completely absurd and stupid. Hongbin hasn’t been on someone’s shoulders since he was a child, and he nearly loses his balance when Taekwoon stands up and has to grab onto Taekwoon’s hair to keep himself upright. “Shit, Taekwoon, be careful,” he hisses, huddling down in an attempt to lower his centre of gravity. “I nearly fell off.”

“Ow,” Taekwoon grunts, and Hongbin reluctantly loosens his grasp on his hair. They are limited, too, by the fact that they can’t touch; Taekwoon has his hands wrapped around Hongbin’s thigh just above the knee, over the fabric of his pants, but Hongbin can’t grab onto anything except Taekwoon’s hair if he loses his balance again.

They wobble their way over to the rock wall and once they’re there it’s slightly easier—Hongbin can put his hand on something to steady himself. “Okay, he mumbles, and positions the ring against the rock, raising the hammer. “I’m going to start hammering. You ready?”

If he could see himself, he would no doubt laugh. He is sure they look ridiculous. As it is he’s too focused on hammering and not toppling backwards, and it’s only when the ring is well and truly secured into the rock that he releases the breath he was holding and inspects his handiwork. Not pretty but it’ll hold, and it’s not until he looks at the fine white dust covering his hands and nearly has the urge to throw up that he realises and remembers. He’s not hammering into rock, he’s hammering into bone, and the thought disgusts him utterly.

They attach the rope to the other end of the patchwork makeshift tent, and then it’s another brief stint on Taekwoon’s shoulders to run the rope through the ring. He lashes it to the sand by wedging a piece of wood in the ground and anchoring it with rocks and running the rope around that, securing it with more rocks for added security, and then stands back to admire their hard work.

It looks exactly like what it is, which is a rotting mast propped up against a wall with a ridiculously mismatched fabric square attached to it. It’s certainly not pretty. But it’s the right shape, and when he ducks underneath the fabric, it’s private and enclosed and dim and makes him feel strangely secure.

They decorate by moving the rugs in there to cover the sand, and once he’s scattered a few of the pillows he’d found about, propped up one of the more legible paintings against the wall, and moved his wooden chest in—well, it’s actually homely, to his surprise. It’s nice to have privacy again, and for a while they just lie there in the sunlight patches created by the holes in the fabric, lost in their own worlds.

“I might end up decorating my cave after all,” Taekwoon murmurs, rolling over and pillowing his head on his arms to meet Hongbin’s eyes. “This is… nice. It… feels civilised.”

Hongbin’s just about to scoff—this? Civilisation? But when he realises it’s the closest touch to modernity he’s felt in however long he’s been here, he shuts his mouth quick-smart. On this island he takes what is offered, and this is what he has been offered. He is grateful for it. He’s even more grateful for Taekwoon’s help, and before he knows what he’s doing, reaches out to pat his shoulder as thanks. The touch lingers, though. Even though Taekwoon is wearing a shirt, Hongbin can still feel the slightly hypnotising heat of his body. “Thanks for your help. I couldn’t have done it without you.” He inhales, exhales, and his fingers tighten. “I… saw you earlier. When you were the dragon.”

The change in Taekwoon’s expression is instant. He grimaces and sits up, batting Hongbin’s hand away in the process—he looks some combination of livid and disgusted, and Hongbin doesn’t know how to react. “I told you to stay hidden,” he hisses. “If he saw you—”

“He didn’t. So it’s fine.”

“That’s not—” Taekwoon shakes his head and runs a hand through his hair, the exasperation palpable. “I—I cannot _control_ him, Hongbin. He does what he wants and he takes what he likes. If he saw you… I would not have been able to stop him. I am not—I am not fucking _strong enough!”_

Hongbin sees it coming from a mile away. His world moves in slow motion as the red-orange flares in Taekwoon’s chest, spreading along his veins and burning in his eyes, haunting and terrifying. “Taekwoon,” he murmurs, tongue heavy as lead. He reaches out and places both hands on Taekwoon’s shoulders even though he’s absolutely terrified; the dragon is so close to the surface that Taekwoon just snarls in his face, body vibrating with a terrible power. “Taekwoon, listen to me. I’m here. I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

He pulls Taekwoon in for a hug, being careful to avoid their skin touching, and holds him tight as Taekwoon begins to fall apart in his arms. The whole time he repeats his litany of nonsense—“I’m here, I’ve got you, I’m here, I’ve got you, I won’t let you go, I’ve got you”—and he knows, he knows that if Taekwoon loses control, if the dragon slips out, he will die.

And still he holds on.

It is an age before the trembling stops, and another age before the glow fades. Hongbin only knows when Taekwoon comes back to himself because he starts sobbing, fists clenching in the fabric of Hongbin’s shirt desperately. “I’m sorry,” he gets out. “I’m sorry. I’ll never let him hurt you—never.”

“Hush,” Hongbin murmurs, stroking Taekwoon’s hair and humming as he rocks them gently both side to side. “It’s fine, Taekwoon. I’ve got you.”

 

***

 

Taekwoon catches and cooks a bird for dinner, in celebration of their combined efforts on the lean-to, and Hongbin revels in the fatty meat as he eats it with his fingers, not caring that he’s being gluttonous. Taekwoon, on the other hand, is withdrawn. He has barely spoken since the incident in the afternoon, and seems very far away.

“Taekwoon,” Hongbin says, pulling a strip of meat off a bone. “You know your books, yeah? What’s your favourite one?”

It’s a blatant tactic to try and distract him, but Taekwoon doesn’t seem to notice, or even care. He meets Hongbin’s eyes, but his gaze is rather lifeless. “My books? Hm… My favourite is a play, actually. _Romeo and Juliet_? Do you know it?”

Out of all the things Taekwoon could have said—Hongbin can’t help himself, he bursts out laughing. “ _Romeo and Juliet_? I mean, I know it, but—it’s just unexpected, is all.” He looks back down at his bird, still chortling to himself. “I never would have picked you for a romantic.”

“It is not really a romance, though,” Taekwoon hums, looking into the fire. “It is a tragedy. Two people torn apart by circumstances outside of their control.”

Hongbin is shocked into silence at that, and eats another piece of meat for something to do. Taekwoon is right, of course. _Romeo and Juliet_ is a tragedy described as a romance; he hasn’t read much Shakespeare—beyond what he had to read back in school—but from what he remembers of it he enjoyed it. “What makes you like it, then? If it’s so sad.”

Taekwoon looks at him, gaze a little more spirited this time—pensive, but not as lethargic as before. “The emotions in it are very… human, I suppose. To love someone enough to die for them. That is not something I will ever get to experience. So it is… escapism.”

“Seems a bit masochistic,” Hongbin suggests, and when Taekwoon shoots him a confused look, shrugs. “As in, you enjoy hurting yourself.”

“How else will I know what it feels like?”

Hongbin doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t have answers for Taekwoon, for this strange dragon whose mind is a mystery even after all this time they’ve spent together. His heart hurts for him, too. Love—it’s one of the basest of human emotions, isn’t it? Human being the painful part for Taekwoon.

“You said there were other dragons at the poles. Why don’t you just… fly away? Meet a nice dragon chick and make some dragon babies?”

His attempt at humour, however crude, falls flat. Taekwoon just shoots him a wan smile and starts poking at the fire. “I was born here. I will die here. It is the way things must be.”

Taekwoon is as non-communicative as he’s ever been, so Hongbin gives up on conversation entirely and they finish the rest of their meal in silence. He can sense that Taekwoon is brimming with emotions, none of them identifiable to Hongbin, but given that he doesn’t want to talk about it there’s nothing he can do. He doesn’t even look up from the fire when Hongbin bids him goodnight; he just nods, clearly somewhere very far away in his head.

Hongbin doesn’t sleep when he gets back down to his cave, though. Instead he stokes his own fire and sits by it, leaning against the rock wall and looking out over the sea as he continues carving the dragon. His mind is empty, his hands moving of his own accord, and when he finally gets sleepy and crawls into his new little home, he doesn’t dream of anything at all.

 

***

 

He doesn’t see Taekwoon at all the next day, which is not surprising. He sort of expected it. Something in him knows that Taekwoon doesn’t want company, so Hongbin doesn’t seek him out. Instead he stays in the shelter of his lean-to—which he’s calling his ‘room’ in his head—and rereads one of the books he’s borrowed from Taekwoon, taking breaks to keep working on the dragon he’s carving. It’s coming along nicely; in fact, it’s probably the best of all the carvings he’s done thus far, and he keeps adding little details to it, like horns that look suspiciously like Taekwoon’s.

It’s strange, actually, to think of the dragon like that. He knows it’s Taekwoon, in some form. But the way Taekwoon talks about it… it’s almost like a seperate entity rather than a facet of his own self, so that is how it has become in Hongbin’s mind. There’s Taekwoon, and then there’s the dragon, and they seem to constantly be at war with each other.

He doesn’t have answers. He has no way of getting them. So he reads and he whittles and he eats and he sleeps, and this is all he can do.

 

***

 

It is another two days before Taekwoon surfaces, most of which time Hongbin’s spent completing his carving and reading and being lazy for the sake of it. He appears in the mouth of the tunnel, looking anxious and apologetic, and offers Hongbin a weak smile that Hongbin returns with more enthusiasm.

“I’ve got something for you,” Hongbin says, getting up from where he was reading by the fire and ducking into his room to get the carving. It’s not very big, about the size of his palm, but he’s very proud of it and he’s beaming as he offers it to Taekwoon. “Look! It’s you.”

The expressions that cross Taekwoon’s face are something to behold, and none of them are particularly positive. He takes the carving from Hongbin’s outstretched palm gingerly, as if it’s going to explode, and looks at it with something that just might be disgust. “Thank you,” he murmurs, mouth twisting. “I—it’s very nice.” When Hongbin raises an eyebrow, he sighs. “The workmanship is lovely. But I just—I do not like being reminded of what I am. This does not feel like… me.”

Hongbin’s not a therapist. He’s anything but. What he is, though, is a good listener, and someone his friends used to come to for advice, so he just shrugs nonchalantly, even though his heart has started to race at the sight of the dragon in Taekwoon’s hands. He is awfully afraid of the dragon, even though he’s fascinated by it too. Who is more afraid out of the two of them, he wonders—him or Taekwoon?

“But it is you,” he replies, as gently as he can. “You said it yourself when I asked you what you were: ‘I am a dragon’. It’s who you are.”

Taekwoon shakes his head. “The dragon is—I cannot control him—”

“Maybe because you’re fighting him.” Taekwoon levels him with a stare, and he holds his hands up, placating. “I’m not trying to change your mind, Taekwoon. I’m just trying to think about it differently. If there were some way for you and the dragon to be in harmony with each other—maybe you wouldn’t be this… agonised over it.”

For a long time Taekwoon doesn’t reply. He just keeps turning the carving over in his hands, mulling over something, and then abruptly shoves the little dragon in the pocket of his pants and folds his arms over his chest. “I’m hungry. Are you?”

It’s not exactly subtle, but Hongbin is not going to force Taekwoon into a conversation he clearly does not want or is not ready to have. Instead he just nods. “Want me to crack open a can of food? I think I have beans and spaghetti.”

“Sounds revolting,” Taekwoon replies with a nod. “Let’s do it.”

They settle on spaghetti, which, when Hongbin opens it, is thankfully still edible. They warm it over the fire and take turns to eat from the tin—with their hands, which Hongbin still is getting used to—and watching Taekwoon take his first bite of processed modern food is something to behold indeed. To Hongbin it tastes like heaven, stale and vaguely-off as it is; to Taekwoon it’s clearly disgusting, and he keeps pulling faces.

“Hongbin,” Taekwoon starts as they’re—well, Hongbin is—slurping down the last of the sauce from the tin. “What’s your hometown like?”

Hongbin nearly chokes on the sauce and ends up in a coughing fit, Taekwoon slapping his back gingerly as he tries to breathe. “What made you want to ask that?” he splutters.

“I… feel like you know so much about me. Everything about me, really. But I—I don’t know much about you.”

It’s a valid point. The only things Taekwoon really knows is that Hongbin is a merchant captain, twenty-five years old, and knows how to sail. It’s not that Hongbin hasn’t been forthcoming about himself deliberately, but in the beginning he was unsure of how much to give away and now that they’re friends it just never seemed relevant. Still, Taekwoon has asked. And Hongbin can’t deny him this.

“It’s a city on the sea,” he says, putting the can down and licking his fingers, not caring he’s being impolite. Taekwoon doesn’t seem to care, anyway; his eyes are on Hongbin’s hands. “Built around a harbour, with a river running to the west. I used to do yacht racing in the harbour when I was younger. My father owned a boat, so we’d often go sailing together, too.”

It’s not until he says this that he realises he hasn’t asked about Taekwoon’s father—he’d never mentioned one, just his mother. But it’s an awkward thing to ask, after all, so he bites his tongue.

“Did you live with your family?” Taekwoon looks away, into the fire. “Or are you married?”

Hongbin snorts. It’s a valid enough question, he supposes. But Taekwoon says it like those are the only two options: be married or live at home, which, given his taste in literature, may be all that he knows. “No, I’m not married.” He holds up his hand, illustrating its ring-less state. “I’ve never dated anyone, actually. And I don’t live at home. I have an apartment near the beach. I’m at sea a lot of the time, though.”

He likes his job. He likes being at sea. But it’s terribly hard work; the hours are long and these days most of his job involves doing more paperwork than he likes. The pay, and the fact that he’s doing something he loves, make it worth it. Maybe that’s why he never could get properly involved with anyone; he kept to himself at university and was too busy working from there on out. It’s not like he’s worried about it; he’s still young and has his whole life ahead of him—

His whole life ahead of him on the island.

It’s like the wind has been knocked out of him. Of course, it’s one thing to contemplate spending the rest of his life on the island, but quite another to put it in perspective. Another sixty years here with only Taekwoon for company… At least the prospect does not have him gasping with fear like it did before. Instead he’s just resigned, sadly muted as he looks at Taekwoon’s face, lit from the side by the sunlight and the fire both, turning his skin to liquid gold. Stuck on an island for the rest of his life with only a dragon for company. What a story that would make.

Taekwoon seems to sense the shift in mood, and turns back to face him. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” He stands up, stretching so his shirt rides up before ambling over to the open side of the cave, standing close to the edge. “The wind looks beautiful today.”

“I’m sorry, _what_ did you say?” Hongbin asks, not sure he’s heard correctly—the wind looks beautiful? What is Taekwoon on about now?

“The wind… looks beautiful today?” Taekwoon repeats, blinking innocently as Hongbin gets to his feet and marches over to where he’s standing to see what he’s on about. “What’s wrong with that?”

The view looks the same as it always does. The rocks beneath, the sea before, the sky above. There’s no sign of any wind—in fact, the sea is flat and calm today, more like a mirror than anything else. “How can you _see_ the wind?”

Taekwoon looks at him, eyes wide. “How can you not?”

“Agh!” Hongbin throws his hands up and walks away, the frustration running through him more playful than serious. “You have got to be kidding me. You’re not seriously telling me that—that dragons can see the wind? That’s—I mean. That’s absurd.” He pauses and spins round to face Taekwoon. “What does it look like?”

Here Taekwoon looks out again, and squints. “Ah. It is—I mean—I don’t know if there are words in English to… describe it. It is like—colours. Shifting colours. Pathways in the sky, almost. Rippling. Un—undulating. Is that a word? Hang on. I’ll show you.”

And before Hongbin knows it, he vanishes through the crack in the rock at the back of the cave, returning seconds later with a handful of glossy green leaves he’s clearly just ripped off one of the poor trees. It’s as if Hongbin has whiplash—he’s too busy being awed at Taekwoon’s clumsy yet beautiful description to really focus on what he’s seeing. Not that it matters; Taekwoon is determined, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him gently closer. “Here,” he says, cupping the leaves in his palms. “Watch.”

He stretches out his arms over the cliff, seemingly unconcerned about losing his balance. The leaves twitch in the breeze, and then when he flattens his palms, start fluttering away one by one. Hongbin half-expects them to fall towards the rocks, but to his surprise they twirl end-over-end and go drifting out towards the sea, spiralling over each other but remaining, more or less, in a line. For just a moment he can see the path the wind is taking, carrying the leaves away from them, and then they get too small to see and he lets out the breath he was holding.

“That was beautiful,” he murmurs, looking at Taekwoon to find him already watching. Their gaze meets and he offers Taekwoon a small smile. “Thank you for showing me.”

In the silence grows a warmth; it comes from his comfort at being in Taekwoon’s presence, at the way Taekwoon’s looking at him, at what he’s just shared. It’s intimate, a visceral moment shared between the two of them, and he somehow feels undeserving. They are so close, close enough that he can feel the warmth emanating from Taekwoon—that hypnotic warmth, the warmth he’s drawn to, and before he knows it he’s swaying ever-so-slightly closer.

But Taekwoon’s eyes widen and he backs away, and the moment is broken. “You are welcome,” he says, but his smile is perfunctory and as he retreats back to the fire, Hongbin feels completely and utterly confused.

He stands there for a long time, looking out to sea, lost in his thoughts.

 

***

 

The days pass like that, in a lazy haze of hedonism and inertia that’s bone-deep and hard to shake free. They lounge about, eating and fishing but most of all reading—there’s a certain peaceful companionship in lying there on the pillows and rugs of his room, Taekwoon by his side, the both of them with their heads buried in books. They don’t speak much. It doesn’t feel like they need to. For now this is enough, and Hongbin relaxes into the feeling.

They don’t touch—Hongbin wouldn’t mind it but he feels too awkward suggesting they go for a swim just for some skin contact—and the dragon does not rear its head at all. In fact, the longer time passes the easier it is to forget just what Taekwoon is, which seems absurd. It is absurd. If someone had told the Hongbin of a month ago, the Hongbin who was so ready to fling himself off the cliff to escape a certain fiery death, that he’d be able to sit next to Taekwoon without fear he would have laughed in their face. And yet here he is, lounging next to a dragon. But it’s no longer really a dragon. It’s just Taekwoon.

One day, apropos of nothing, Taekwoon throws down his book and sighs.

“What’s up?” Hongbin asks, and then shakes his head when Taekwoon immediately looks up. “No, I mean—what’s wrong?”

“This book.” Taekwoon shakes it as if it’s insulted him personally. “It’s just—it is frustrating reading and trying to picture things that are second nature to humans. Half the time I barely understand what is going on.”

“Which bit is giving you trouble?”

Taekwoon flips open the book and begins to read. “‘They waltzed together, time passing them by utterly—nothing else in the world mattered except each other, the pleasant strains of the music, and the knowledge that they were together once more.’ What’s a waltz?”

Hongbin reaches for the book, tugging it from Taekwoon’s hands and flipping it over to read the blurb. It’s an old-fashioned book, a romance set in the late 18th century by the looks of it, and once again he marvels at Taekwoon’s odd taste in fiction. “It’s a kind of dance.”

“Yes, but what kind of dance!” Taekwoon’s eyes narrow in frustration. “See—you can read that and picture exactly what is going on. I have never seen anyone dance before. I don’t know what is going on, how they hold each other, where their feet go, how fast they move. I don’t know anything.”

“You’ve never seen anyone _dance_ before?” Hongbin marvels aloud. The moment the words leave his mouth he knows he’s focused on the wrong part of Taekwoon’s spiel, and holds his hands up, trying to soothe. “Okay, alright. I get it. So… a waltz…” He wracks his brain for his extremely limited knowledge of dancing, trying to picture what comes to mind when he thinks of the word. “As far as I know, it’s a dance usually performed between a man and a woman. The basic steps are… nothing fancy?” It comes back to him now; a cousin had gotten married and as their first dance the couple had done a waltz. They’d taken lessons just for the event, and while they weren’t polished, the mistakes were sweet and endearing. “You just kind of… go around in a circle. It’s a very old-fashioned dance. Very formal. I guess most people do it at… weddings now? Big events like that.”

Taekwoon is silent for a few moments, digesting this information. Hongbin can practically see the wheels turning in his head; he’s chewing his lip, and his hair is down over his eyes. “Show me,” he commands suddenly.

“Show you?” Hongbin splutters. “Taekwoon I can’t—I can’t dance.”

“You just told me what it was like. If you can tell me, surely you can do it.”

“Yeah, and maybe if you told me what flying was like, I could do it too,” he snipes, but that was the wrong thing to say. Taekwoon curls in on himself, withdrawing, and an eerily-blank mask slides over his face. It hurts to see him retreat so viscerally, and Hongbin digs his nails into his palm, the sting making him focus. “I’m—I’m sorry, Taekwoon. I didn’t mean it.” He takes a deep breath in and lets it out. “I’ll show you.”

So that’s how he finds himself standing opposite Taekwoon on the sand—who is still looking wary and closed-off—with his arms out, looking like a twat. He has no idea what he’s doing. He watched a movie about ballroom dancing, once? A long time ago. Back in high school. All he can do is try his best, and so he arranges his arms in an approximation of what he remembers and begins. “So you hold each other like this, I think. Um. And then you just… step. I think it’s done to a three-count? So… one-two-three.” And he takes three slow steps across the sand, moving to the side. He’s certain his feet are all wrong, and he knows he looks idiotic, but there’s a spark of something that might be interest in Taekwoon’s eyes and—maybe that makes it worth it.

“I see.” Taekwoon murmurs, copying Hongbin’s arm position and taking three unsteady steps himself. He looks even more tragic than Hongbin does, which is saying something. “It would be easier if there were… music.”

Hongbin raises an eyebrow. “Hey, I’m not the one whose home has no electricity. Or even a radio. Here, I’ll clap for you.”

So he claps for Taekwoon, one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three as Taekwoon repeats the steps over and over again. He isn’t really picking it up, however, although it’s not like Hongbin can blame him. They are both out of their element, and it is seemingly a hard dance to do alone.

“Taekwoon,” he says, stopping in the middle of clapping. “We could—we could dance together, if you wanted.”

There it is again, that spark of something in Taekwoon’s eye, but he frowns. “We cannot touch.”

They can’t—at least not their bare skin, anyway, which is kind of mandatory. They’re both wearing shirts, so that’s not a problem, but even he knows that couples hold hands while doing the waltz… and he doesn’t have any gloves around. There’s a spark of an idea in his head, but the lingering fear of the dragon presses into him, alarming and sharp, and he hesitates. Despite what he has said, Taekwoon has displayed a certain amount of control over the dragon, especially in Hongbin’s close presence. And last time… Last time Hongbin had been holding him, rocking the dragon away… Maybe, maybe, maybe—or maybe he is just being suicidal again.

Oh well. No time like the present for pressing boundaries.

“No problem,” he chirrups brightly, and then steps into the circle of Taekwoon’s arms, holding Taekwoon’s bare hand before he can protest. “Let’s go.”

Dragging a recalcitrant dragon around in a circle is about as easy as it sounds, especially because he only gets about two steps in before Taekwoon realises what’s happening and panics. “We’re _touching_ ,” he hisses, eyes that are already starting to glow going as wide as dinner plates. “Hongbin, I’ll hurt you—”

“No you won’t!” Hongbin says, cheery, even though he’s pressed up against Taekwoon’s chest and can feel just how hot he’s getting. He doesn’t let go of Taekwoon’s hand, either. “Come on. Dance with me, Taekwoon.”

Taekwoon has legs of lead. He stumbles as they clumsily traipse around the sand, and whenever Hongbin meets his eyes he looks as if he’s on the verge of a panic attack—it’s more than alarming to see just how close the dragon is to the surface, evident by the spiderweb threads of red-orange all over his face and neck. But Hongbin doesn’t relent, and he doesn’t let go of Taekwoon’s hand, and as they dance (one-two-three one-two-three) he feels Taekwoon begin to relax in his arms minutely. “How…?” he murmurs, finally putting his hand on Hongbin’s back, the touch absurdly gentle for how frenzied he looks. “I don’t understand.”

“Me neither. Maybe you’re not fighting him as much.”

“Maybe,” Taekwoon replies, but his eyebrow is quirked.

They keep moving until the glow fades entirely. Hongbin doesn’t let go of Taekwoon’s hand the entire time; he feels as if he’s the only thing keeping Taekwoon upright at this point. Their steps are clumsy and almost certainly incorrect, and Taekwoon’s long legs won’t seem to obey him, but slowly and gradually they begin to get better. Alright, maybe not better. Maybe just less awful. But they’re treading on each other’s feet less and less, and when Hongbin switches direction suddenly, Taekwoon is able to keep up. It’s surprisingly fun, and Hongbin’s too caught up in the awe of his plan working to care that they’re just wobbling around in a lopsided circle.

“Thank you for this,” Taekwoon murmurs some time later. The circle has gotten so small that they’re basically just swaying back and forth in each other’s arms at this point; when Hongbin looks up he realises just how close their faces are.

“I told you I can’t dance,” Hongbin replies, just to hear Taekwoon snort. “You’ll regret it when you wake up with bruised feet tomorrow.”

“I don’t just mean this. I mean—the—” Taekwoon lets his sentence trail off and looks away. “For… for not being afraid to touch me.”

He gives Hongbin’s hand a gentle squeeze, and Hongbin squeezes it right back. “It’s okay,” he murmurs. “Hey. Taekwoon. Look at me. It’s okay. I know you won’t hurt me.”

For just a second there’s an expression that Hongbin can’t quantify on Taekwoon’s face, before he schools it into something more neutral; he doesn’t know what it is but it sets his heart to racing. As if that weren’t enough, Taekwoon leans into him, pressing their bodies together and resting his chin on Hongbin’s shoulder.

He’s now certain Taekwoon can feel his heart thudding through his body—he must, if it’s roaring in his ears. He doesn’t even know why. It’s… it’s strangely intimate, which is an odd word to use given that their life, by definition of proximity, has been intimate since the day they met. But this feels different, somehow. More raw. More soft, more open. Perhaps it’s because Taekwoon’s hand is clasped tightly in his. Perhaps it’s how he can feel Taekwoon’s breath tickling his neck. Maybe it’s all that and more—Hongbin can barely believe that he’s even admitting these things to himself, given that part of him still fears the dragon and that another, larger part of him is terrified at this new closeness between them.

He has never felt this close to anyone before, he realises abruptly. In the wake of this new knowledge rushes fear, as new and as unfamiliar as the island itself, and as they stand and sway he thinks of _Drachen_ , thinks of the sea, and wonders how on earth he got here.

“Thank you,” Taekwoon murmurs again. His lips are pressed into Hongbin’s neck, the words felt rather than heard, and Hongbin tightens his grasp to anchor himself and closes his eyes and does what he has been doing since the beginning.

Breathe. Focus. Compartmentalise.

_Feel._

 

***

 

Nothing much changes after that.

Or, at least, on the surface it doesn’t. They resume the routine they’ve comfortably settled into, passing the days reading quietly together, occasionally fishing or going for walks along the rocky shore. But it’s not the actions that change, but rather the air between them; there’s something crackling there now, something unspoken. It’s in the way Taekwoon looks at him with soft eyes and more openness than Hongbin maybe thinks he deserves. It’s in the way that how they’re not touching feels even more deliberate than normal, which is odd. It’s in the quiet silences, the companionship that feels strangely natural now; it comes upon them so slowly that when Hongbin thinks back to how they first met, he barely recognises himself.

That is not to say it is always peaceful, however. He passes a book to Taekwoon one day, their fingers brushing carelessly, and is sent leaping back when Taekwoon folds at the waist, glowing red and shaking and coming apart. “Taekwoon?” he gasps, reaching for him before reconsidering. The fear he feels, he notes, arrives sluggishly, almost lazily. “Are you—are you alright?”

Perhaps it was naive of him to consider Taekwoon cured—if you can call it that—of his inability to touch after one impromptu dance lesson. But… that was progress, right? Taekwoon was making progress? Apparently not as well as Hongbin thought, because he looks up at Hongbin and roars, looking less human now than he’s ever looked.

The fear rears in him, and he takes a trembling step backwards. “Hey,” he murmurs, ignoring the way his voice is wavering. “You’re alright. You’re Taekwoon, remember? And I’m Hongbin.”

“Mine,” Taekwoon hisses, but Hongbin’s eyes widen when he realises that this is not Taekwoon talking any longer—it’s the dragon, using Taekwoon’s voice as his own. “Mine,” he repeats, and the glow gets brighter.

Taekwoon’s shirt has burnt away—it’s no wonder he knows how to sew; he must have learnt out of necessity, to keep himself clothed—and so there’s no part of him available for Hongbin to touch. Instead Hongbin just starts humming under his breath, a nonsense tune that he doesn’t even remember the name of, hands up. He will only have a few seconds to get into the tunnel if the dragon completes the transformation; it’s behind him and to his right, and he takes another shaky step back.

But he doesn’t need to. It’s a long few minutes before Taekwoon pulls himself back from the edge, and Hongbin can see it in his gaze as he comes back to himself—but it’s not a joyous occasion. Taekwoon’s eyes are wracked with pain, teeth gritted and muscles straining as he fights his very self, and all Hongbin can do is watch.

“Does it hurt?” he murmurs, kneeling beside Taekwoon on the sand from where he collapses, legs giving way. It’s a pointless question, because he knows it does. Taekwoon had said so himself. “I mean… what does it feel like?”

Taekwoon doesn’t reply for a while. He sits there on the sand until the sheen of sweat on his brow begins to fade, and then he gets up and makes his way over to his chest on unsteady legs, guzzling eagerly from the canteen inside. “It feels as if I am burning,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Like I am—like I am lost. I am torn apart and the dragon is brought forth and I have no control over it.”

“You do,” Hongbin points out. “You just battled him and you won.”

“I am tired,” Taekwoon says, and his everything about him screams it—he looks exhausted, not just physically but in the way he speaks, in his eyes. “I am at war with myself.”

Hongbin knows he doesn’t have any words to offer in light of that statement. Instead he just sits on the sand next to Taekwoon, leaning against him carefully so Taekwoon can feel the warmth and pressure of his body (although to Taekwoon he feels rather cold, amusingly). Even though touch through fabric can’t compare to skin-to-skin contact, it’s something, and it is all he has to offer.

He still does not know how he got here, how he’s at the point where he can look the dragon in the eyes and not turn and flee. Perhaps it’s because Taekwoon was so vehement when he swore he would not let the dragon hurt Hongbin, and in spite after all they’ve been through—or maybe because of it—Hongbin trusts him. Perhaps it’s because all they’ve shared; they have naturally grown closer as consequence. He does not know when wariness morphed to faith, but he truly, honestly believes that Taekwoon will not hurt him.

There’s a square of fabric lying nearby—the beginning of a shirt for Taekwoon, no doubt—and without thinking he snags it and drapes it over his hand before reaching for Taekwoon’s own. “Here,” he murmurs, grasping Taekwoon’s fingers through the fabric and giving them a gentle squeeze.

Taekwoon squeezes him back, and they sit there together on the sand, holding hands back to back and watching the sunset fall over an island that Hongbin never expected to start to feel like home.

 

***

 

It’s a testament to how far Hongbin has come that he has stopped counting the days entirely.

This day in particular begins with a blood-red sunrise, painting him and his cave in the kind of light that he hasn’t seen in years. He eyes it warily as he gets up, stretching and muttering to himself—“red sky at morning, sailor’s warning”—before ambling out to the spring to bathe. There’s no doubt that the way the red reflects on the ocean is gorgeous, but it makes him nervous even though he’s not at sea and has no plans to be. He’s got too much salt water running through his veins for the sight to not make him just a little bit skittish. At least if there is a storm he now has shelter from it, he supposes. Small blessings.

He showers and shaves and dresses before heading up to Taekwoon’s cave, books in hand. After Hongbin had redecorated his, Taekwoon had taken an interest too—he hadn’t done anything as drastic as making a lean-to, just put down a few ratty rugs and arranged his books with care instead of tucking them away in his chest, and the effect is altogether quite homely and rather welcoming, Hongbin realises as he steps inside. Taekwoon is awake, sitting by the fire with _Romeo and Juliet_ in his hands, and he looks up and offers Hongbin a smile.

 _He’s pretty when he smiles,_ Hongbin realises faintly, stacking the books he’s borrowed neatly with the others and surveying the pile for something new. Well, Taekwoon is pretty always, but now—his hair brushed away from his eyes, which crinkle up genuinely—it’s something special, and he can’t help but smile back. “Just reading today?”

“Actually, I was thinking of going fishing.” Taekwoon dog-ears the book and puts it down. “I think I’ll dry some of it again. Would you like to come?”

It’s a rather pointless invitation since they both know Hongbin does, but that’s the way they do things—still dancing around each other, unsure. As it is Hongbin accepts and waits for Taekwoon to fetch his spear before they make a detour down to the storage cave, where Hongbin ferrets around in a box he remembers and pulls out a rather dilapidated fishing net. It needs repairs, but it’ll probably do for one day, and so together they head to the shore, Hongbin beaming at his prize.

Taekwoon frowns the moment they step outside the caves and the wind hits them, and he points out to sea, to the east, where there’s nothing but clear blue sky and ocean. “A storm is coming,” he says.

“You can see that?”

“And sense it. In here.” Taekwoon touches his chest briefly, and Hongbin thinks that in another life, another time, he’d make one hell of a good sailor. “But we have time. It will arrive in the afternoon.”

Still buoyant over his find and also over the fact that he was right, he follows Taekwoon along his great ancestor’s spine, past the beach, down to where the spine trails off into the sea. This is further north than they’ve been before, and maybe he shouldn’t be surprised at that; the island is relatively large, and he hasn’t seen all of it.

He hasn’t fished with a net in years, and is suitably rusty. Taekwoon, on the other hand, is an expert with his spear. Hongbin is now used to his slightly jarring movements, and here it is a strength; he moves so fast Hongbin can barely see it at times, and crows in delight every time he manages to spear a fish. After an hour, Taekwoon has a good little pile going, and Hongbin has managed to catch… one.

“Can I ask you something?” Taekwoon asks when they’re both having a break, sitting on the rocks and passing the canteen back and forth.

Hongbin squints up at him, but Taekwoon’s face gives nothing away; he’s very good at hiding his true feelings, unlike Hongbin, who is an open book. “Only if I can ask you something, too.”

Taekwoon fiddles with the leather he’s wrapped around the middle of his spear, to better help him grip it. “I understand that… that this might be hard for you to talk about,” he starts, and Hongbin is immediately wary. “But… but I was just wondering why you never talk about your crew.”

Hongbin’s head immediately snaps back to the sea, as if he can hear his crew calling him. “Because they’re dead,” he says shortly, the words sending pain reverbing through his chest.

“You don’t know that.” Taekwoon’s hand rests on his shoulder, a soothing touch, and Hongbin resists the urge to shrug it away. “They could have survived…”

Hongbin gets to his feet and wades into the water until it’s calf-deep, its cool tempering his rage. “ _Drachen_ ’s lifeboats were out of date. They were launched on davits instead of rails—and we were lucky to get them launched at all—and they weren’t enclosed. We were miles offshore. I’d radioed the authorities but—it was a storm, Taekwoon. A storm no ship should have been at sea in. We were alone out there. _They_ were alone out there. It would have taken a fucking miracle for them to have survived.” His voice is tight, and it takes monumental effort to rein in his anger, but somehow he manages it.

Taekwoon, however, does not give up. Hongbin feels him approach, and then he’s pulling Hongbin into a gentle embrace from behind. “Tell me about them,” he murmurs, voice low and quiet in Hongbin’s ear. His lips brush Hongbin’s skin and they shiver in sync, the touch making Hongbin’s skin feel as if it’s buzzing.

“My chief mate,” he begins, the words falling out of him rather than him speaking them voluntarily, “was just—everyone loved her. She was always smiling, always happy. A real breath of fresh air, you know? So many merchant officers are grumpy old bastards. But she was always making everyone laugh.”

He loses track of time completely. He closes his eyes and talks and talks and talks, talks until he has no words left, telling Taekwoon about the twenty-three people aboard his ship. Some he didn’t know well. Some he’d never met before that day. But he has something to say about every single one of them, and he stands there in Taekwoon’s arms and speaks the words aloud, feeling a weight leave his chest, a weight he never even knew was present. When he finishes his throat is aching from the effort of holding back sobs, and there’s stray tears working their way down his face—something about this island is always bringing him to tears, he notes in a distant sort of way. Maybe that is who he is changed into.

“Thank you for telling me,” Taekwoon says, voice low and sincere. His arms tighten around Hongbin for a moment and then he’s gone, leaving Hongbin feeling oddly bereft without the comfort of his warmth. When he turns, Taekwoon is looking out to sea, face drawn. “We best get back inside. The storm is coming.”

Hongbin thinks that’s it, that their discussion is over, but as they make their way back to tunnels Taekwoon slings a friendly arm over Hongbin’s shoulder, being careful not to touch properly. “You said you wanted to ask me something?”

“Do dragons have culture?” Taekwoon blinks, startled, so Hongbin hurries on. “I know you’re alone—but surely your mother taught you some things? Customs, rituals? Songs? Language?”

Their gaits are uneven and don’t match, so it’s easy for Hongbin to slide an arm around Taekwoon’s waist under the guise of support. Taekwoon doesn’t even look surprised; he’s too busy frowning, chewing at his lip. “Language… yes, we have a language. It is—it is hard to explain. I can speak it in this form, but it almost feels… incomplete? Improper? Like I lack the full understanding, in a way. In—when the dragon comes out it’s more… absolute.” He looks down at Hongbin for a moment, his smile awfully droll. “I have not spoken dragon out loud for years.”

They reach Taekwoon’s cave in record time. Hongbin dumps the spear and net and they sit down to gut the fish, positioned by the open side of the cave so they can watch the storm roll in.

“Can you speak it now?” Hongbin asks, somewhat tentatively, avoiding Taekwoon’s eyes.

Immediately Taekwoon launches into—well, Hongbin doesn’t know how to describe it. It’s a language that sounds flowing and strangely melodic in a choppy way; Hongbin wouldn’t know how to begin emulating it. He isn’t the least bit surprised when the glow starts in Taekwoon’s chest as he talks.

“What did you say?” he asks once Taekwoon is finished.

“First you want me to speak it, and now you want me to translate?” Taekwoon complains, but his tone is light and he smiles at Hongbin. “Let me think—I said something like… well, it’s a poem, of sorts. ‘Wings spread wide across the horizon… sailing, gliding forth, raining fire… Look upon your doom and your salvation…’ Something like that.”

Hongbin slides his knife into the belly of a fish as slow shivers roll down his spine. As if he needed a reminder of the dragon’s savagery, here one is, delivered in the form of a poem spoken so nonchalantly by Taekwoon, as if he were discussing the weather. “And culture?”

“I… don’t know much. A lot has been lost over time… and we remained here, cut off from the rest of the world. The island’s defenses have held so far, have shielded me, but I do not know if it will last forever. I expect one day to be… found.”

It’s a non-answer. Hongbin recognises it as such and nods, turning back to his fish silently. There is time for talk and there is time for quiet, and if Taekwoon has taught him anything, it’s to appreciate both times equally. And so they sit and they gut and they fillet, and once the fish are finished, the storm has arrived in spectacular fashion.

“Shit!” Hongbin hisses, standing up. He can see the rain approaching across the sea, advancing like a marching army, and dithers. “We’re going to get wet—”

Taekwoon takes the basket of filleted fish and tucks it under his arm. “Come on. We’ll go to your lean-to—”

“Not with the fish you won’t! You’ll stink out the place—”

“Alright, fine, but just—”

Their bickering means the rain hits them and without saying another word Taekwoon drops the fish and they make for the tunnel, dipping downward, spilling into Hongbin’s cave, making a beeline for his lean-to. They slip underneath the fabric and poke their heads out to watch the deluge. What was once a bright afternoon sun is now a dim darkness, as if night has fallen early, and there’s a bright flash of lightning and a boom of thunder that sends Hongbin reeling backwards. It’s not the day _Drachen_ sunk. He knows it’s not. And yet the noise still strikes fear into his heart, making him press himself into the rock, eyes wide.

“Hongbin,” Taekwoon murmurs quietly, picking up the blanket Hongbin sleeps underneath and draping it over his shoulders for him, smoothing down the front. “I’ve—I’m here.”

The prospect no longer fills him with terror, only a pleasant warmth in his chest, and so he leans against Taekwoon and sighs. “I know.”

He does not protest when Taekwoon’s arms come around him, rocking him gently back and forth; he does not protest when he feels Taekwoon drop the briefest of kisses on his scalp. He just closes his eyes and clings on, letting himself be comforted.

 

***

 

They sleep in each other’s arms that night, neither bothering to question it, Hongbin not even knowing how. Taekwoon’s warmth is soothing, in a way he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to explain; as the remnants of the storm pass over and leave them in darkness, he does not feel alone.

He is, he thinks, anything but.

 

***

 

The morning begins with a touch.

It is fleeting; Hongbin barely notices it at first, isn’t roused from sleep. But it continues, the tickle of fingers down the inside of his forearm, the ghost of a caress on his face, and he leans into it without even thinking, catching the hand and bringing it to his lips—

“Taekwoon,” he gasps, sitting upright and snatching his hand away. “You—”

Taekwoon smiles at him. It’s a sleepy smile, and with his hair all mussed, it’s actually very sweet. “The dragon is quiet today,” he murmurs. “Maybe he has not woken up yet.”

This time when Taekwoon reaches out to touch again, Hongbin holds completely still—but just as he said, when he cups Hongbin’s cheek, thumb running over Hongbin’s lips in a way that has him drawing in a ragged breath, there is no hint of a glow in his chest or in his eyes. “Good morning,” Hongbin whispers against Taekwoon’s thumb, and they both shiver.

They don’t press their luck. Taekwoon only remains there for a few seconds more before pulling away with a smile and ducking out of the lean-to, leaving Hongbin to run his fingers over his own lips as if he can’t quite believe what happened. The skin behind feels seared, Taekwoon’s touch having burnt him in the most pleasant way, and by the time he emerges from his room he’s smiling to himself.

“Fish for breakfast?” Taekwoon says brightly, standing in the mouth of the tunnel with his hands on his hips. “The ones we gutted yesterday might still be alright.”

Fish… for breakfast? Hongbin is too giddy to really complain, so he just nods and follows Taekwoon upwards. His cave is in less direct sunlight—it faces north—but is still light enough to have Hongbin squinting against the brightness as they emerge. The fish, as it turn out, are still alright, although Hongbin sniffs them suspiciously for a long time (“My sense of smell is better than yours,” Taekwoon tells him archly, “and I can smell that they are fine”) before obligingly settling before the fire to watch Taekwoon cook.

“I was planning on reorganising the storage cave today. Would you like to join me?” Taekwoon asks.

He keeps glancing at Hongbin nervously, and Hongbin is still too sleep-addled to find out why. Is it because of the touch this morning? Or because of last night? “Sure,” he mumbles, rubbing his eyes to clear the sleep from them. “Why are you rearranging it?”

“Oh, you know.” Taekwoon pokes at the fire nervously. “Just because.”

Hongbin squints at him. He’s acting strange, nervous and jumpy, but it’s beyond him as to why so he just eats his fish in silence and slowly wakes up. Taekwoon barely lets him finish before he’s urging him to get up, and Hongbin is utterly confused why they make their way down to the cave in such haste. Maybe Taekwoon’s just really enthusiastic about rearranging.

He at least seems to settle down as they start hauling boxes around, thankfully. They do the work in silence, only a few words exchanged here and there—“what about this one?” “bring it over here”, “doesn’t this go at the back with the rest of the junk?”—and nothing really of importance. He actually thinks he might get away with being almost totally nonverbal all day (and for good reason, too; he’s ruminating on the events of last night and this morning) until they decide to take a break and Taekwoon, beaming, sits himself on a box in front of Hongbin expectantly.

“What?” Hongbin asks, the word coming out a bit sharper than intended. “You’re being weird.”

“Weird? Weird how?”

“Just—weird.” He sighs. It’s pointless to try and push the point further when Taekwoon is blinking at him innocently. “It doesn’t matter. How long do you think we’ll be doing this for?”

Taekwoon’s gaze slides to the side, as if he’s considering. “Hm. Until dusk?”

“Dusk? You want to keep me here all day?”

“It’s just—”

“This is what I mean when I say weird! You’re being weird.” Hongbin squints at him. “What are you hiding?”

At this Taekwoon leans in, grin stretching wider and wider. “I’m a dragon,” he whispers conspiratorially, yelping when Hongbin smacks him playfully on the shoulder.

Perhaps it’s a distraction technique. Maybe he’s just in the mood for more skin contact. Whatever the reason, they start play wrestling in earnest, although it quickly becomes somewhat of a one-sided contest. Hongbin isn’t what he’d consider weak, but he can’t compete with dragon strength, and soon Taekwoon has him pinned, the faintest tinge of red in his eyes.

And yet Hongbin does not feel afraid.

“You win,” he murmurs, breathless, and Taekwoon breaks into a grin and helps him up. “I’m damn glad you’re my friend and not my enemy, though. You are strong. Sure you couldn’t have dragged that mast around by yourself?”

They resume reorganising boxes, although Hongbin’s patience is running thin and after an hour or so of backbreaking work he huffs, running his hand over his forehead to catch the sweat dripping off there. “I’m going back up to the caves. I need water. A nap. Something.”

Taekwoon looks at him, face drawn. “But I still need help here—”

“Taekwoon, it’s been hours. I’m tired, and my rib is hurting for the first time in a long time, so I really do need a break. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

His tone leaves no room for arguments, and yet he still feels a little guilty as he makes his way back up to his cave, walking slowly and stretching his arms. But Taekwoon is usually reasonable. Even if he’s being weird today, he’ll understand. Surely. It’s just some boxes; there’s no reason why they have to be done today.

The first thing he does when he arrives at his cave is guzzle water from the canteen, upending the rest of it on his head and revelling in the refreshing sensation. The caves, when ventilated to the outside, can maintain a reasonable temperature, but when they are closed off they become horribly humid. In fact, a bath in the springs wouldn’t be a bad idea. Neither would be some fruit, and so rather absentmindedly he wanders out that way, one hand on the rock to steady himself as he walks the smooth, narrow path. He strips quickly and slips beneath the water, nearly moaning at how good the cold feels, and when he surfaces runs a hand over his hair and sluices the water from it.

It’s a sparkle on the horizon at first; he thinks it’s just water in his eye, refracting and playing tricks on him. He rubs his eyes to fix it, only it doesn’t go away, and entranced he swims up to the edge of the spring as if to see better. His brain can’t even process what he’s seeing. It’s just… a white triangle in the ocean? A moving white triangle in the ocean?

A… yacht?

“Taekwoon!” he screams, leaping out of the spring and pulling on his pants, grabbing his shirt and sprinting into the tunnel. “Taekwoon!”

He keeps yelling Taekwoon’s name as he spills out onto sea level, nearly tripping and falling on the rocks in his rabid attempt to get closer to the first sign of civilisation he’s seen in months. It’s heading north, and so he sprints down the spine, leaping from vertebra to vertebra and waving his shirt over his head frantically. “Hey!” he screams, loud, louder, loudest, “HEY! I’M OVER HERE!”

He is as far north as he can get, standing on the last piece of bone above water. The yacht is probably a mile out, and if he squints he can just see that its sail is torn—did the storm yesterday do this? How did it get here? Can it see the island? Can it even see _him?_ He stands there and screams until he’s hoarse, waves his shirt until his arms can’t raise anymore, and falls to his knees and watches as it gets smaller and smaller and finally disappears from view entirely.

It did not see him.

He is lost once more.

 

***

 

Taekwoon is waiting for him at the base of the skull. He opens his arms and Hongbin walks into them without thinking, shivering all over. When he closes his eyes he sees the yacht, his last chance at freedom; when he opens them again all he sees is the nightmare of bone and sea he has become accustomed to.

“There was a yacht,” he murmurs into Taekwoon’s shoulder. “I saw it but—it didn’t stop, it didn’t see me, it didn’t—”

“Hush.” Taekwoon strokes his hair. “It’s alright.”

It’s alright. It’s alright. He’ll be alright, they’ll be okay. “If I’d just seen it earlier,” he moans, shivers making his teeth chatter. “If I’d just seen it earlier I could have—”

Taekwoon’s hand stills in Hongbin’s hair, and he’s silent.

He’s silent.

He’s _silent_.

Hongbin rears back from him, but Taekwoon does not have to say a word to protest—guilt is written all over his face, painting his features something horrible, something revolting, something that makes Hongbin want to spit and kick and fight. “You—” he gasps, reeling, his entire world reeling. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

It all makes sense. Taekwoon’s insistence on getting him away from anywhere with a view. His determination to keep Hongbin underground and away from the sea. How jumpy he’d become after he’d left the lean-to—Hongbin wants to _kick_ himself, he hates himself for thinking it was just residual effects of their touch. How could he be so stupid?

“Hongbin,” Taekwoon says, “I—let me explain—”

“Look me in the eyes and lie to me.” Hongbin’s chest heaves as he stands there, his world falling apart around him once more. He thought he would have gotten used to the feeling by now; instead he feels more adrift than he’s ever been. “Did you see the yacht this morning or not?”

Taekwoon’s lip wobbles, and his fingers, when he reaches for Hongbin, are trembling. “I—I couldn’t… I saw it, but I—”

He has heard enough. The trust between them fractures. Hongbin feels it, deep inside his chest; a crack, sharp and pointed and unbelievably painful. Taekwoon is crying but Hongbin has no sympathy, no words for him. He shoulders past, walking with his head held high, not looking back.

He does not let the tears fall, even though they crowd his eyes and make his throat sting.

 

***

 

Breathe.

Focus.

Compartmentalise.

_Survive._

He needs to keep his hands busy. He needs to do something or else he will go insane; he feels himself teetering on the edge of it already. So he is productive. He heads into the cave where _Escape_ was, for the first time since the dragon burned her, and puts his hands on his hips and looks at what is left.

There’s not much, if he’s honest. Most of the junk in here was wooden, and it burnt with _Escape_. But there’s a single singed pallet, much like the one he washed up on, and some sort of plastic drum, which is a start. He drags them both up the rock and balances them near the shore before heading back inside again, hands shaking, thoughts single-mindedly focused on a goal. If he can make a raft of some sort, if he can just—if he can _prepare_ , he won’t have to rely on Taekwoon, if a ship ever comes by again. He can get himself out of here.

It takes him another few hours to gather another pallet—this one with a few boards missing—and another three plastic drums of varying sizes. He arranges them all on the rocks and begins lashing it all together feverishly. He’s not made a raft before. He has no idea what he’s doing, but it doesn’t need to float very far; it just needs to bear his weight and get him out of here. By the time he’s finished the sun is just setting, and he drags it over to the sea and pushes it in while bathed in the orange-red light of sunset.

It floats. It fucking _floats_. It’s rather lopsided, but it doesn’t even sink when he crawls on top of it and then, balancing precariously, stands up, shifting his weight back and forth on the balls of his feet. It’s stable enough, and it will do. He doubts he’ll ever get the chance to use it again, but—just in case. Just in case.

He ties it to more junk, buried in the sand and not going anywhere, and heads back up to his cave. He doesn’t eat or drink or bathe. He just crawls beneath the fabric wall of his room and lays down to sleep, unwilling to be alone with his thoughts even now.

 

***

 

The raft is a nice distraction, and one that’s easy for him to get lost in. He spends all next day perfecting it as best he can—tightening the knots, adjusting the position of the drums, finding a suitable oar to use—and it’s not until he’s sitting on the floor of his cave, packing a worn canvas bag that he’d found in one of the caves, that his thoughts finally catch up with him and he folds at the waist, keening with the pain.

After all they’ve been through together. After how many times Hongbin proved that he trusted Taekwoon. After how many times he’d helped soothe the dragon—does he not deserve better than this? Maybe it’s selfish of him to think so, but—surely Taekwoon knows how desperate he is to get home. Why the hell would he hide such a thing?

Unless, unless… an insidious thought winds through his brain, taking root there and spreading its poison. Unless it was the dragon’s doing all along. Unless Taekwoon has been lying to him this entire time, that their growing closer was not an innocent consequence of all the time spent together but rather a manipulation technique, to get Hongbin to trust him and let his guard down so the dragon could… could what?

What, exactly, does the dragon want to do with him?

His mind is a snarling black mass of thoughts, racing and tumbling, and all he can do is hold on for the ride. Taekwoon is still hiding secrets, even after all this time. Hongbin was willing to overlook them but now—now in the wake of what happened, it’s suspicious.

He shoves a piece of fruit in the bag, slings it over his shoulder, and stands up. He doesn’t even know where he’s going. He just needs to move, the restlessness growing in his chest and taking control of his limbs. Going upwards to Taekwoon is a temptation, but no; his feet take him downwards, spilling out into the main cavern, which is impossibly dark now the sun has set. _Secrets, secrets, secrets,_ there’s secrets thrumming through his brain and blood, the secrets the island is holding close, the secrets that will tear them apart.

He makes his way to where his raft is moored and puts the bag on it, tying the tattered strings to a slat of one of the pallets before heading back into the cavern, drawn there inexplicably. He stumbles his way through the dark, intending to make his way to the crevice but getting distracted halfway there by the altar. He hasn’t given any thought to it since the first time he found it—just wrote it off as part of the island’s impossibility—but now he slows, detours, runs a hand over it to feel the ash. Everything here on the island has a purpose. This altar must have a purpose, but what?

Why did he never ask Taekwoon about it?

“Hongbin?”

As if Hongbin’s summoned him, he hears Taekwoon’s voice echoing around the cavern, sounding small and very far away. “Over here,” he calls, not taking his eyes off the altar.

There’s the crunch of rock underfoot, and then Taekwoon’s making his way over. His shoulders are rounded in and he’s got both arms wrapped around his middle, making him look smaller than he really is, and Hongbin can’t help himself—his heart pangs and he wants to reach for Taekwoon, to console him. Instead he just folds his arms over his chest.

“What is this?” he says quietly, gesturing at the altar.

He’s watching Taekwoon’s face carefully, so it’s impossible to miss the way he blanches, face turning a horrid pallid colour. “It’s nothing,” he murmurs, but it’s a lie and they both know it. “It’s—it does not matter what it is.”

Hongbin runs his fingers over it again and shows Taekwoon the ash that remains there. “I think it does.”

“Please.” Taekwoon’s voice is haggard. It sounds like he’s been crying. “Please do not ask this of me.”

The fear slides into Hongbin, neat and sharp, and his senses are suddenly honed. He can hear his heart thudding in his ears, his breath rattling in his chest, and he knows that they are about to die. “What is it? What is its purpose?”

Taekwoon tilts his head back, closing his eyes so Hongbin can see the streaks of tears down his cheeks. “It is where I was born.”

Hongbin is frozen in place.

“The one thing I have not told you is how dragons reproduce,” Taekwoon deadpans, eyes still closed. “It is not mating as your kind knows it. We have human bodies, after all. Part of us is human… and we remain human until we undergo the first transformation. That humanness has to come from somewhere, does it not?” Here he opens his eyes, meeting Hongbin’s gaze. His eyes are empty, devoid of emotion, and it frightens Hongbin more than he’d like to admit. “For a dragon to be born, a human has to die. And not die quickly, no; it does not work like that. The human must be burnt alive. The human has to scream, and the human has to die in agony, consumed by fire from the inside out. The dragon is born from the ashes.”

Nausea grips him, and Hongbin stares at his hand in horror. This is not ash, no, it is what was once a human—Taekwoon’s poor parent—he reels back, leaning over and emptying his stomach on the rock next to him, gagging and retching as his eyes tear up. He can’t hear anything but the thud of his heartbeat, and he spits and straightens up, breathing heavily. Dead, dead, dead, they’re dead, he’s fucking dead, they’re all dead. “So,” he pants, the words in his mouth like venom, cutting his throat and his tongue and leaving him a shattered mess, “this is what the dragon wanted, was it? It wanted to fucking— _breed_ me—to burn me from the inside out and watch me scream? This is what you wanted?”

His accusation has caught Taekwoon off-guard, or so it seems; he is clearly a good actor if he’s been lying to Hongbin all this time. “What? No—”

“You were going to _kill_ me—”

“No I wasn’t!” Taekwoon puts both hands out, pleading, desperation etched in his features. Amazing how he lies even now. “That’s—I never—”

“You’ve been lying to me all this time,” Hongbin snarls, approaching one laboured step at a time. “You wanted to get close to me so I’d trust you. So you could manipulate me. So you could _burn_ me. That’s why you didn’t tell me about the yacht, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s—”

And still Hongbin advances. “You didn’t tell me because you needed me here to use me—you said it yourself, dragons are dying out!”

“That’s not what happened—”

“Then what did happen?” roars Hongbin, all the rage unleashed, all the fear unbridled. He’s screaming in Taekwoon’s face. The glow begins in Taekwoon’s chest in response, but Hongbin does not even flinch. He is ready to die. “You saw the yacht and you didn’t tell me deliberately. Why? Why didn’t you fucking tell me?”

“I want—I want you to stay here, but that’s not why, I promise that is not why—”

“Then why!”

Taekwoon snaps and whirls, eyes glowing that beautiful, fierce red. “I want you to stay because I lo—” He cuts himself off violently, expression morphing into one of utter shock.

It’s as if Hongbin has been slapped across the face. The wind leaves his sails and he careens backwards, barely in control of his own movements. “ _What_ did you just say?”

But Taekwoon just shakes his head. His hands, enveloped in glowing tendrils, are curled into fists by his side. “I said I would never let the dragon hurt you, and I meant it, Hongbin.”

For a long moment Hongbin regards him. He looks small and pathetic. Still part of Hongbin wants to comfort him, to wrap him in his arms and rock him and assure him it will all be alright—but he can’t do this, he can’t exist on this island of lies any longer, can’t live with the truth of what the dragon wanted all along.

“I don’t believe you,” he spits, and shoves past Taekwoon.

He runs, ignoring Taekwoon calling his name, feet slipping on the rock. He goes down on a knee, hisses with the pain, gets back up and keeps going. He does not care if he lives or dies. He can’t—he can’t do this any longer. He can’t. He is exhausted and depleted. The island has won, as they both knew she would.

He unties the knots of the raft with trembling fingers, jumping aboard and using the oar to push away from the rock. He is crying, he realises distantly. Oh. Strange—he feels as if he’s very far away from everything, adrift, bereft.

The ocean does not rise up to greet him as he paddles furiously away, gritting his teeth as Taekwoon’s voice gets quieter and quieter. Any moment he is prepared for whitecaps to show, for the waves to arrive and pull him into the deep where they all know he belongs, but instead the sea does not protest. When he dares a look behind him, everything is shrouded in a thick fog, impenetrable to the eye. He can no longer hear Taekwoon’s voice.

The island lets him go, and at last, he is free.

 

***

 

He floats.

Time slips away, as liquid as the sea surrounding him. Nothing feels real. He is lost, existing only in a dream; he knows he died the day _Drachen_ sunk and that this is all a nightmare dreamed up as punishment. Why else would he have fallen—

No. He will not think of it.

One day passes, or maybe two. With no respite from the sun his skin burns. He dips into the ocean once, but the cool of the water shocks him into lucidity, and he hates it so much that he would rather bake and remain mindless. He does not touch the food. He rations the water. He wishes for death, in his head and out loud, but death does not come. The open ocean is flat, inviting. He floats onward; to where, he knows not. The island took all who he is, scooping out his insides and leaving him hollow. It _hurts_. It would perhaps be tolerable to lose himself, if it was painless. But it hurts like nothing he’s ever felt before.

He curls up into a ball once the sun sets for the second time, and lets the gentle rocking of the waves push him into sleep.

 

***

 

On the fourth day, there is something in the distance.

It is just a speck, dark. Maybe it’s the island again. He could paddle towards it, but he can’t be bothered. Instead he just lies back down and peels some fruit slowly, singing nonsense words out loud to himself. Is this what insanity feels like? Aren’t you meant to not know if you’re going insane? Whatever. Hongbin doesn’t care.

When he next looks up, a few hours later, the speck has grown bigger, and he can see that it’s not the island at all. Instead it’s a shape that’s horribly familiar, a shape that has him sitting upright, adrenaline suddenly flooding through his veins and making him feel awfully alive.

It’s a container ship.

It’s still miles away, but heading towards him; immediately he gets to his feet, wobbling a bit precariously on the unbalanced raft, and pulls off his shirt. Just like last time he starts waving it above his head frantically, although he doesn’t bother screaming this time. They wouldn’t be able to hear him from that far away and he is not sure he has the energy. Right now he will just be a speck off their bow. If he’s lucky, they’ll see him. If not, they’ll sail right past and leave him to die.

He is not sure which he would prefer.

He can only stay on his feet for a few minutes before, weakened from not eating, his legs start wobbling and he has to kneel. Still he does not stop waving, switching arms every so often when they get tired. The chances of seeing him are infinitesimal; the closer the ship gets the more he can see just how big it is. And then of course the issue of getting on board—he is not sure he has the strength to climb up a pilot ladder, if the ship could even come to a dead stop in time.

He waves for hours. The ship sails past without slowing in the slightest, and at last he knows his fate.

 

***

 

He wakes to the sound of helicopter blades.

It’s chaos—the blurry shape of a chopper above him, whipping his face and hair and creating such a roar that he can’t think, can’t move. A figure descending from the heavens and strapping him into a harness. The sensation of being winched upwards, reaching out weakly for the raft below, his last connection to the island.

He is laid flat on his back, an oxygen mask placed over his face. “Wait—” he tries to say, struggling upwards, but then comes a sharp sting on the inside of his elbow and he drifts away into the blackness.

 

***

 

_Beep. Beep. Beep._

He opens his eyes and is assaulted with lights. The sensation to close them is overwhelming, but he pushes himself upright instead, taking stock of his situation. A hospital—must be. The sheets are scratchy against his skin and when he looks at his tanned hand on the crisp white, it looks wrong. Too-clean. This isn’t right, this isn’t—

A nurse rushes in, obviously alarmed that the beeping has changed in tone, but she smiles when she sees he’s awake. He doesn’t recognise her—but then why would he—where is he—

“You’re awake,” she says, in accented English. “Good. You’re a popular man. There’s a detective out there waiting to talk to you.”

A _detective?_ No, this can’t—the helicopter, the ship, the raft, the island—he knows how he got here in theory, but in practice, he feels more adrift than he was at sea. “Who?” he asks, voice scratchy, but she’s already gone.

The man who walks in has an air of sincerity about him, and his eyes are kind as he sits in the chair next to Hongbin’s bed, but Hongbin can’t help it, he regards him suspiciously. Before he would just know, but now, he finds himself questioning. _Are you a human too? Or are you something else?_

“What’s your name?” the detective asks with that same accented English as the nurse.

“Lee Hongbin,” he replies, on autopilot more than anything else.

The change in the detective’s face is startling. He looks relieved and then overjoyed, mouth stretching wide into a grin that has Hongbin inching away from him. “Well, I’ll be damned. We had our suspicions when you were airlifted in, but—well. The whole world thought you died. You’ve been missing for three and a half months now.” He shakes his head, smile morphing into something more wry. “What _happened_ to you?”

 _Where am I? Who are you? Why do you care?_ All valid questions, but instead the one that spills from Hongbin’s mouth is—“My crew,” he gasps, the beeping speeding up again. “My crew, are they—”

“Your crew? The crew of _MV Drachen_? They all survived, of course,” the detective says, looking surprised. “That’s why everyone was so amazed when you… ”

They… survived?

They _survived_.

The weight of guilt slides off his shoulders into a puddle on the floor and he doesn’t even know what to feel. He didn’t kill them. _He didn’t kill them._ The demons in the deep calling to him were of his own creation, and he sags back against the pillows and starts laughing maniacally. He doesn’t notice the detective looking alarmed. He doesn’t care about anything—they _lived_ , they survived, nothing else matters.

“What happened to you?” the detective asks again as Hongbin’s laughter dies off, face serious now.

Hongbin takes in a breath to tell him, but finds he does not know where to begin. He cannot tell the truth. He knows that much. Taekwoon is—Taekwoon was—whatever Taekwoon did to him, Hongbin will keep his secret. He has to. Which means he has to come up with a story somehow, to explain three-and-a-half months of presumed death.

“I don’t know,” he murmurs, more to himself than to the detective, and as the reality of being back in the real world settles in his stomach, he almost wishes he was lost once more.


	4. Chapter 4

While he was on the island, real life was a fantasy. It was escapism. He would resume his life exactly as it left off, complete with _Drachen_ , complete with his crew.

The reality of it, however, is anything but.

He steps off the plane to camera flashes, to reporters shoving microphones in his face. It’s only been three days since he first woke in hospital—he wasn’t really injured, just dehydrated, so they’d just needed to keep an eye on him—and he’d expected to be able to return home with no fanfare.

The world has other ideas, though. They are fascinated with him—a real life _Castaway_ story, they are calling him, and he is front page news across the world. He repeats the same tale every time, word for word, reciting it with as much enthusiasm and emotion as he can muster, even though he is completely numb inside. He hasn’t felt a thing since he looked behind him as he drifted away from the island and realised he couldn’t see it. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.

His parents welcome him home with open arms. His mother sobs openly, and his father is gruff but keeps slapping him on the back genially, and wipes his eyes when he thinks Hongbin isn’t looking. He doesn’t mind that they are treating him as if he’s made of glass. He is utterly inept, confused by everything even though he has been gone for months, not decades, and has no energy to protest.

He crawls into his childhood bed and sleeps for three days straight.

When he wakes and wanders into the kitchen, he spies the newspaper laying on the bench and snags it, flipping it open and noting, rather numbly, that at least he isn’t on the front page anymore. Instead he is relegated to the sixth or seventh, just a small article, a fluff piece about his homecoming.

The screen door bangs and he looks up to see his father coming inside, tugging off his rubber boots and knocking sand all over the floor. “Hongbin,” he says, but the relief in his voice is evident, as if he still can’t quite believe he is there. “Morning. Anything interesting in the paper?”

“Just myself,” Hongbin sighs, putting it down. “Where’s—”

“Your mother? Gone up the shops. The phone’s been ringing off the hook for you, by the way. We took down messages.”

Idly, Hongbin wanders towards the landline. There’s been a pad of ancient paper beside it for as long as he can remember, and sure enough, there’s a list of names and numbers scrawled in his mother’s handwriting. Nearly all of them are his crew, he notes, and although he expects to feel pleasure at seeing their names written down—evidence of their being alive, here in the flesh—he feels nothing. The last name on the list is SOSC, his employers, and he sighs and picks up the landline, realising that his mobile is lost somewhere in the ocean and he doubts he’ll ever get it back.

“Hi,” he starts when his boss picks up the phone. “It’s Hongbin?”

 

***

 

A few nights later, when his parents are asleep, he slips out of bed and heads to the bathroom, locking the door behind him and turning on the light.

He looks different. He looks gaunt, even though he’s been eating well since he returned—the first thing he did when he got his appetite back was eat a cheeseburger—and his hair has lost its shine. There is no light behind his eyes. He once again looks like a dead man walking, and he’s not sure why.

He imagines Taekwoon coming up behind him and sliding an arm around his waist. He imagines leaning back into the touch, smiling at Taekwoon’s reflection. He closes his eyes and puts his hands on his stomach, pressing into himself as if he can feel the warmth of Taekwoon’s body—

But he opens his eyes, and it is a lie.

 

***

 

No one, it quite seems, knows what to do with him; he is out of place in every way. His parents thought him dead, and keep touching him to make sure he’s real. His company, too, had ordered his life insurance settlement paid out, and seem very disgruntled that they have to now deal with the insurance company again. He gets awkward facebook messages from uni friends that say _hey, glad you’re not dead_ , although they’re that not blatant about it. There had even been a funeral; he visits his own grave before it is removed and stares at the lettering on the headstone with dead eyes.

He is in the eye of the storm, privy to all and feeling none.

The only nice thing to happen is meeting up with his crew, which turns out to be more emotional than he expected. He breaks down crying in front of them, still feeling oddly numb, and can’t stop apologising for all that he did wrong. Most of them have continued to work, although a few are still taking leave to deal with their post-traumatic stress—they’re the ones who gently encourage Hongbin to see a therapist, and after some resistance, he caves in and goes.

It is awkward. It’s a therapist pressing him to talk about his lies, which he now has to expand upon and make believable. He wants to tell the truth so badly, but what can he say?

_I close my eyes and dream of him._

_I felt more alive there than I ever did here._

_I want to go back._

Every time that last thought pops into his head he violently pushes it away, sinking into denial. He does not want to go back to that island where he was a prisoner—he just doesn’t. His brain is lying to him. He misses the drama of it, the excitement; he doesn’t miss the lack of electricity and plumbing, and he certainly doesn’t miss fearing for his life. He doesn’t miss Taekwoon. He doesn’t. He _won’t_. He can’t.

 

***

 

He and his chief mate have taken to meeting every week or so, at a coffee shop near both their houses. It sits atop the cliffs and overlooks the sea below, and although the sight is comforting to Hongbin, she’s still one of the ones dealing with PTSD, and so he’d been surprised when she’d suggested it.

A lot of the time it’s just silence, but a soothing one. It almost reminds him of Taekwoon in a way.

“They’re coming for you,” she says one afternoon, stirring her coffee with a spoon. Her eyes are terribly serious when Hongbin looks at her in surprise. “The company. The ATSB. They want someone to throw to the wolves.”

SOSC? The transportation safety board? “I don’t understand,” he murmurs, wrapping both hands around his cup and letting the warmth seep into him. “Why me?”

She looks away at that. “Because it was your fault,” she says, voice tight.

He doesn’t have the strength to argue with her. She is right; they both know she is.

 

***

 

There is a tribunal, just as she’d said there would be.

Hongbin feels, once again, as if he is in a dream—modern life has been nothing but an overwhelming whirlwind of sensations that he was not prepared for, and now he is ripped from the safety of his new routine and placed in front of a board of investigators and made to answer for his actions. He deserves it, he knows he does.

The company wants to understand what happened that day that they lost a ship, and the safety board wants to understand why. But it is clear they have no idea what to do with him, just like everyone else. He is shoehorned into an already-prepared investigation, treated with kid gloves and careful glances, as if he is about to snap and lose it on them all. It makes him laugh. He does not have the motivation to do anything, let alone snap.

When he was dead, he was a hero. He was good publicity. A captain who made a mistake but atoned for his sins by saving his crew and dying at the helm of his ship, as every good captain should. Now that he is alive, he is nothing but a thorn in their side, a demon resurfaced from the depths to fuck it all up. He gets the distinct feeling that everyone involved would rather he had remained dead.

The questions they ask are white noise. Over and over again he repeats what happened that day. Over and over again he answers questions, pointed and barbed and designed to lay bare his failures. He is shown the weather reports. He is shown transcripts of the bridge conversations, of his officers doubting his decision behind his back. They exhaust him completely, and all he can do is sit there numbly and give them the truth, or the version of the truth he believes—the more he hears the more he does not know what is real and what isn’t.

“And,” the investigator says, leaning across the table. “Let it be known that we have not touched the story of your survival deliberately.” Here Hongbin’s eyes snap up to meet his, panic beginning to rise in his chest. A _feeling!_ How novel. “Would you state for the record what happened?”

He swallows, but his throat is dry, and he reaches for the cup of water provided for him and takes a healthy gulp before continuing. “I’ve told you this before,” he murmurs, because he has—he’s told everyone and anyone, the same story he dreamed up in that scratchy hospital bed, the same story he first told the curious detective. “I fell overboard and was washed away from the lifeboat. I clung to a piece of flotsam floating past… A piece of a pallet, I think. When I woke I had washed up on an island. My rib was too injured for me to do anything but survive until it healed. As soon as it did, I built a raft using supplies I was able to find on the island, most of it washed up—from _Drachen_ , I think—and floated away. I saw a container ship go past and attempted to signal it, but failed. Or I thought I’d failed. Then the helicopter arrived.”

The stares he is met with are disbelieving but doubtful, as if they don’t trust their own judgement. His story has not wavered in detail at all, and the solemnity with which he tells it lends him credence—it’s an unbelievable story, certainly, but the details are there.

“Moving on,” the investigator says curtly, and Hongbin does not allow the relief he feels at this victory to show in his face.

 

***

 

Another coffee shop meeting. Another day of silence. Another hour of Hongbin clinging to any little bit of warmth he can find, inexplicably drawn to it.

“I think they want to charge me,” he whispers.

She looks at him. This time her eyes are sharp. “What—criminally?” When he nods, she scoffs. “They can’t do that. Can they?”

“Maybe. Or charge me with negligence. Which isn’t criminal but—still.” He runs his hands through his hair. Even the threat of this, even vague, whispered threats of jail, still do not evoke any feelings in him. What the fuck is wrong with him?

“You were negligent, but I don’t think you should be charged for it. Christ. You’re suffering enough.” She slams her hand on the table so hard all the porcelain rattles. “I’ll testify on your behalf. We all will.”

He blinks at her. “What do you mean, I’m suffering enough?”

At this her gaze turns sad, her smile sympathetic. “Look at yourself,” she murmurs.

 

***

 

His father finds him on the beach, and puts a hand on his shoulder before settling on the sand next to him. “Carving?” he asks brightly.

Hongbin looks down at his hands. He’d picked up the driftwood and started whittling away without even really thinking about it, and when he sees what his hands have made, he blanches and nearly flings it away. It’s the beginnings of a little wooden dragon, identical to the one he gave to Taekwoon.

“Yeah,” he sighs, but puts his knife in its sheath.

They sit in silence. It’s nice, the beach at this time of day. The water is still cold enough that there’s not many swimmers, and they’re up the rocky end, so no one bothers them. It’s not like Hongbin was a particularly talkative man before—before. But now? He has no words. He has nothing.

“Son.” His father’s voice is serious, serious enough that Hongbin turns to him, threads of concern winding through his veins. Ah—once again an emotion. It’s nice to feel, actually. “Your mother and I are worried about you.”

Hongbin remains silent.

“I understand that you went through a very traumatic event, but—” His father shakes his head. “And we’re happy you’re staying in contact with—well, with your friends, and that you’re going to therapy. But… are you okay? Are you happy?”

The wood in his hands cuts into his skin as he grips it, tight, tighter, tightest, clinging on until he feels a sting and sees blood. “I don’t know,” he whispers, and can’t meet his father’s eyes.

There’s a long pause. A seagull cries overhead. He should feel soothed by being near the water, but he’s not, and he knows why—it’s not the right water.

“What did you find out there?” his father whispers.

Hongbin jumps nervously. “What do you mean?”

“Out there.” He gestures towards the sea. “Something’s calling you. What is it?”

But Hongbin cannot say. He can’t speak the truth, because the truth is too fantastical to be believed—the longer he is away from the island, the less real it feels, like he really did dream it all up. Maybe Taekwoon was never real. Maybe he was just a figment of Hongbin’s fracturing mind, a symptom of chronic loneliness and fear. Maybe this is just the beginning of a spiral.

_I want you to stay because I lo—_

No.

“I don’t know,” he answers eventually, and leans into his father. He smells familiar, like happier times and childhood memories, and slowly he relaxes incrementally.

 

***

 

He has been home for two months when the results of the tribunal roll in.

“Well?” she calls, practically bouncing in her seat as Hongbin walks in.

He doesn’t bother to order, knows she’ll probably leap across the cafe to throttle him if he does so, and instead just takes his usual seat across from her. “I’m not guilty,” he murmurs, and her grin stretches so wide it’s jarring and then she’s flinging herself at him to hug him.

“I knew it! I knew the bastards wouldn’t be able to get you.” She pulls back and for just a second—for one moment—their faces are close together, too-close, and it dredges up a memory of a different face— _no_. “What happened? Tell me everything.”

So he does, voice as flat and lifeless as ever. He was never officially charged with anything, not even negligence. The report indicates he is at fault for the incident, which he knew from the beginning and has never denied, but also paints a damning picture of the safety culture at his company. It was all there—the unspoken pressure to stick to schedule, the quiet removal of those who protested, the decaying fleet. In fact, they’d inspected one of _Drachen_ ’s sister ships, _Einhorn_ , and found that the metal fatigue in her hull and rust everywhere was comparable to _Drachen_ ’s, and she’d been immediately decommissioned and sent to the scrapyard.

“So I think I’ll be out of a job,” he finishes, leaning back in his chair and crossing his legs. “Doubt they’ll want to keep me on after that.”

Her face is drawn, and she looks out the window, at the sea. “At least you can go back.”

He wants nothing more than to go back. But that’s not what she means, and he shrugs. “I—yeah.”

“Do you still want to? Or are you just going to change industries? I bet the fishing boats would have you, if you wanted.”

He nearly laughs. What an almighty step down, from a merchant captain to a fishing boat deckhand. He hadn’t even considered the thought of work; he’s just been existing from day to day, living comfortably in denial that the real world existed beyond his little bubble of home-beach-coffee shop. But she’s right. He will soon have to start earning money and supporting himself. Presumably he’ll have to move back into his apartment, which he has not set foot in.

Things settle back to normal, without him even realising.

“I—I don’t know what I want,” he says, and the honesty in his voice makes her flinch.

She leans forward and pats his hand. The touch lingers for a second too long, and her eyes are soft, her smile curling up at the edges. He knows instantly what has happened, what he has allowed to grow between them, and allows himself the luxury of wondering—in another life, in another universe, could he look into her eyes and tell her he loved her? Possibly. But not in this lifetime; his heart is a world away and across the sea, and it’s cruel to pretend otherwise.

 

***

 

Emotions, like memories, can only be repressed for so long before they spill to the surface, seeping through the cracks of the walls put up to hide them away. He wakes one night to water in his mouth and throat, bleeding through his lungs and sloshing in his chest. The room is too claustrophobic. The _house_ is too claustrophobic, this city is too tight around him, and he spills out of the front door and starts running down the street blindly. He’s wearing nothing but his sleep shorts, and it’s the middle of the night, but he is impervious to the cold.

He only stops once he is knee-deep in the water, the waves rushing over his thighs and making him shiver. It’s all—it’s too much—it’s too _cold_. No, it’s wrong, this isn’t what he wants, he doesn’t _want_ this—

He wants Taekwoon.

It doesn’t make any logical sense (but then nothing has for months)—the feeling that ever since he got back something was missing, his numbness, his withdrawal. He can’t, this isn’t, he never thought— _I want you to stay because I lo_ —does Taekwoon love Hongbin?

Does Hongbin love him?

“No,” he says out loud to the sea, even though it feels like a lie.

He closes his eyes and tries to picture everything he hated about the island, but all he sees is Taekwoon. Taekwoon, the dragon—he drags up the mental picture of the dragon, teeth bared, advancing towards him like some kind of demon summoned from the deep just to torture him. But he does not feel fear. He is not afraid of the dragon, not at all; he hasn’t been for some time.

 _I said I would never let the dragon hurt you_. Hongbin believed him at the time. He believes him now.

“Oh, god,” he moans, sinking to his knees so the water comes up to his chest. “It’s not fair,” it’s not—no, this is wrong, he’s not meant to be here—he’s meant to be on the island, with Taekwoon, how did it take him this long to realise? How did he sail away from the island in complete denial of what he felt for Taekwoon, what he _knew_ he felt?

He does not remain there for much longer. His parents find him sobbing in the water and drag him back to the house, his mother nearly falling over herself in histrionics, his father stoic for both their sakes. They put him to bed, and when he falls asleep, he does not dream of clawing hands under the deep. He dreams of a pleasant, searing heat, of rocks and bones and myths and legends, and he yearns.

 

***

 

The call comes within a few days, as he knew it would. They fire him apologetically, but he can sense the relief in their voices when he doesn’t protest it, just numbly agrees. He is officially out of a job, and yet, he could not care less.

To his surprise his firing thrusts him back in the spotlight once more. Thankfully he is not front page news this time, instead relegated to second- or third-page by newspapers the country over. A few reporters descend, but back away and acquiesce when he turns his hollow eyes on them. There’s an outrage on his behalf, but like everything, time passes and he is forgotten as more interesting things come to light. He is glad for it.

He is still coming to terms with the fact that for three and a half months, his whole being ached to be here; now he is here, his whole being is aching to be back. It’s whiplash, and yet he does not act, doesn’t dare to. Maybe if he just waits it out, the urge will pass. Maybe life will resume as normal and he will be able to forget the island, forget Taekwoon, even though whenever he thinks of it, he shudders at the thought.

He _needs_ to forget. Taekwoon is—a dragon. Life with him is not feasible. It’s a fantasy, and has to remain as such.

And yet he pines for it.

 

***

 

“I’ve bought,” he says to her, “a yacht.”

Surprise flashes across her face before she can temper it, and she raises her coffee and takes a sip, but he recognises this for what it is—distraction from saying what she’s really thinking. In the end she settles on, “Oh?”, her tone deliberately neutral in a way that seems fake.

It had been somewhat of a spur-of-the-moment decision, inasmuch as buying a boat can be. He’d started browsing ads on the computer on a whim, a way to pass the time as valid as walking on the beach or whittling. It had just been mindless entertainment until one particular ad caught his eye and he found himself returning to it, clicking on it at all hours of the day just to look at it, and eventually he’d gotten up the strength to call.

She’d been even more beautiful in person than in photos—a Cal 39, well-taken care of and in excellent condition. Big enough to cross oceans securely but not so big that he couldn’t sail it solo. He’d been waffling back and forth until he saw her name emblazoned across her stern in a script he couldn’t read, and it wasn’t until he peered closer and read the English beneath that he knew, he just knew.

Her name is _Drakon_.

“A 39-footer. Nice thing. Mid-80s model. Bit on the expensive side so I’d had to haggle the owner down, which was unpleasant, but—” He shrugs. “I have a yacht now.”

“Yeah, but—why?”

He blinks, looks at his cup of cold coffee, looks at the sea, looks everywhere but at her. “I’m looking for something,” he says eventually, and it’s not a lie.

He tosses and turns at night, unable to sleep, thinking of sand and gentle breezes. Nothing brings him pleasure. He’s still numb. In fact, the only thing in recent memory, since his breakdown on the beach, to elicit any kind of reaction in him was when he shook the seller’s hand. Something had shot through him viscerally, leaving him reeling in its wake—it was trepidation and anticipation. He still doesn’t know whether he has the strength to leave everything behind to return to the island once more, but he is one step closer to being able to do so, and that’s enough.

Her eyes, when he eventually looks at her, are sad, full of pity. She thinks him mad. She thinks he’s lost his mind at sea and is embarking on a fruitless quest to find it—which isn’t that far off the mark, actually. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” she murmurs.

 

***

 

As if he hasn’t blown through enough of his savings, he schedules for _Drakon_ to be dry-docked and inspected head-to-toe, slightly (rightly) paranoid after his experiences on _Drachen._ While she’s in there he organises her to be refitted with state-of-the-art GPS weather system and new radios; he keeps thinking of things he needs at all hours of the day and night and adds them to the list.

Once she’s out of the dry-dock, he asks his father to come sailing with him, and together they sail cautiously around the harbour, Hongbin getting a feel for her and his father keeping a careful eye on him as he does. He’d expected to feel fear at being at sea again. Instead he feels, for the first time in months, the beginnings of joy, and finds himself grinning widely every time he hoists the mainsail. _Drakon_ is nimble and quick, rolling pleasantly beneath him, and when they head out past the heads for the first time and into the open sea she handles even better than he expected.

And still he doesn’t leave. As much as all of him is begging to, feet dragging him to the beach in the middle of the night just so he can stare at the sea, there’s still something holding him back. It’s fear, although it’s not fear of the dragon. It’s fear that he misheard. It’s fear that Taekwoon doesn’t feel the same way. It’s fear that he will go all that way and Taekwoon will turn away from him; he is not sure how he could live with himself if that happened. So he sits and he waits, sailing _Drakon_ every weekend regardless, waiting for a catalyst to set him alight.

 

***

 

As it turns out, the explosive catalyst that he was looking for never comes. Instead he just keeps sailing, going further and further out each time, until one day he turns back to look and realises he has lost sight of the land entirely.

There’s no concern, no desire to turn back. Instead an eerie sense of calm settles over him, the righteousness over what he’s doing instilling a strange confidence in the way he moves. _Drakon_ has been outfitted for long-distance cruising since she got out of dry dock. He has maps stored below, as well as food and water supplies, and even a duffle bag full of clothes and some small pieces of modernity that he could not leave behind.

A pang of guilt runs through him when he thinks of his parents, of how worried they’ll no doubt be once he disappears once more. But this is not permanent, he tells himself. He just needs—he just needs to _know_ , needs to tell Taekwoon all he’s been feeling since he pushed the raft away from those ancient bones, needs to get it out of him and then, maybe, maybe he can start to heal. Possibly even forget.

He only sees one small issue with the plan, and it’s that he has no idea where the island actually is—however he knows where _Drachen_ ’s wreck is, and that is as good a starting point as any. Standing at the helm, he programs the coordinates into the autopilot, grimacing when it tells him it’ll be at least three days’ sailing to get there, if the wind cooperates.

He smiles at the little dragon he’d carved and placed very carefully next to the compass, affixed down with double-sided tape, although it’s quite a nervous smile all things considered. “Here we go,” he mutters to himself, and takes the wheel and yet again leaps forward into the void.

 

***

 

The journey is awfully quiet, and awfully lonely.

He hasn’t really been alone since before he met Taekwoon, and while this is a slightly more pleasant experience than the island—the yacht has quite a few luxuries that make it bearable, even comfortable, like a shower and a proper toilet—he certainly has not missed being by himself. Even when he arrived back home he was always being swarmed, by his parents or reporters or both. They meant well, but—it is only now, when he has time to think, that he realises how much he has missed the peace and quiet that the island had bought. Even with Taekwoon, they often wouldn’t talk much, and that companionable kind of silence is not something he has experienced with anyone before. Maybe this would be bearable if Taekwoon were here. Hongbin doesn’t allow himself to get lost in his fantasies, though. He is too uncertain for that, although every mile he gets closer to the island, the more his conviction grows.

He is doing the right thing. He knows he is.

He hopes he is.

 

***

 

On the second day, there is a storm.

He sees it coming on the GPS, and radios in for more information. What he hears is not good. It’s not as intense as the storm _Drachen_ was lost in—thankfully—but it’s certainly not something that is going to be fun through to sail through. He alters his course so he’s heading for the yellow bands of the storm as depicted on his GPS, instead of the red, and begins preparing.

It’s not until he’s closed and latched every window belowdeck that it really hits him what he’s about to do, and he nearly falls to his knees, blind with panic. He can still hear the awful shrieking sound _Drachen_ had made as she split in two, ringing in his ears and reverbing through his body almost painfully. When he closes his eyes he sees splashing orange vests in the water; when he opens them, he sees hands calling to him from the deep. This is not the same storm. It’s not even close. But it’s _a_ storm, and that’s enough for the memories to come flooding back, as vivid as the day they’d occurred.

He could turn back. It would be easy; he would run before the storm winds all the way back to safe harbour, to the security of his home, of dry land. It’s tempting, unbelievably so. But—Taekwoon—Hongbin on his knees in the water, coming to terms with a truth he cannot bear—Taekwoon, shaking his head, _I want you to stay because I lo—_ no. He cannot turn back.

He will push on even if it means the death of him. He is committed, now.

Somehow, he drives away his panic as best he can, putting it in a box in his mind to open later when there isn’t serious sailing to do. He grabs the storm jib from the cupboard in the fore of the cabin and rigs it with trembling hands; chances are he won’t need it, but he learnt his lesson with _Drachen_ and is not about to repeat his mistakes. He just has enough time to put on his bright orange rain suit before the storm is nearly upon him, and so he takes up position at the wheel, thoughts utterly determined even if he feels like he can’t quite breathe.

Then the storm hits, and he can’t think anything at all.

There is something about a storm at sea that is so much more savage than one on land. It is as if nature is truly releasing all its power at once, concentrating it, whipping up waves that boggle the mind and winds that are simply cruel. The rain pelts into Hongbin’s eyes and he can’t even wipe it away because he’s too busy hanging on for dear life, heart racing so fast he thinks he’s about to die as _Drakon_ tackles the waves head-on. This is not _the_ storm, this is not _the_ storm, but oh, he is terrified. He needs to focus through the panic coating his tongue and seeping into his blood, poisoning him from the inside out, but it’s nigh on impossible—he can’t see, can’t hear, doesn’t know except the feel of the boat through the wheel in his hands, how she’s straining against him, how the wind is pushing them off course. He needs to head to the south to skim the edge of the storm—his own words come back to him, echoes of a past life, _“you know what these southerly squalls are like,”_ —but _Drakon_ is a traitor and wants to head north, into the eye of the storm.

He doesn’t know how long it lasts. Hours, probably. But unlike _the_ storm, this one merely wreaks her havoc on his nerves and his courage and departs with nary a backward glance, dissipating as fast as southerly storms usually do. He is left with his hands locked around the wheel because he can’t move them, dripping water and shivering, filled with a feeling that just may be the first strains of triumph.

 

***

 

The rest of the journey is uneventful, if not a breeding ground for all his anxieties. He only sleeps for a few hours at a time, with the radio turned up to max volume in case he gets any calls. He barely eats, even though he know he should. The closer he gets to _Drachen_ ’s grave the more overwhelming his thoughts and memories become until he takes to pacing the length of the yacht back and forth just to stretch his legs.

He feels like he doesn’t know himself. He lost himself the day he washed up on the island, and he lost the image of himself he rebuilt the day he sailed away. Right now he is a patchwork mess of feelings and thoughts, undefined. He doesn’t know if he’s lost his mind and is truly insane; he doesn’t know anything except that he wants Taekwoon, and the fact that he is still coming to terms with that fact doesn’t help any.

The autopilot beeps, and it shocks him out of his apprehensive reverie. It’s a beep to indicate he’s reached his destination, although when he gets up and goes out on deck, he just finds himself in the middle of the sea. Which is to be expected, of course, but he almost felt it would look different somehow, that there would be some tangible evidence of what happened here. He knows that the only evidence is thousands of feet below him, but—still.

He drops the mainsail and comes to a stop, _Drakon_ drifting a little. The water is beautifully calm, the opposite of what it was when he was last here, and it is almost appropriate in a way. He doesn’t say anything. That feels a bit too sentimental, and he doesn’t know if he has it in him. Instead he stands on _Drakon_ ’s bow for a few minutes, scanning the water, thoughts a jumbled mess of memories that make no sense out of context. He’d sort of expected to feel panic, but instead he almost feels… peace. The most peace he’s felt since the island, actually. It’s soothing.

The peaceful feeling, although assuaging his fears a little bit, doesn’t solve his problem of where to go next. He has no way of telling which direction the current swept him away to; his technology has assisted him this far but it’s useless now, much like him. Perhaps doing this was a stupid idea after all. Maybe he’s just a madman chasing a dream, searching for something that died half a year ago—maybe he should just turn around and go home and resume his life.

Instead of doing that, though, he holds onto the forestay and closes his eyes, feeling the wind on his face and sinking into his memories. He deliberately thinks of Taekwoon, even though it hurts; he thinks of Taekwoon swimming, hair swept back from his face and with water droplets sparkling in his eyelashes, making him look even more ethereal than he usually did. He thinks of Taekwoon, clinging onto him as he sobbed; he thinks of Taekwoon pushing the dragon away time after time to keep to his word; he thinks of the feeling of Taekwoon’s hand in his, the way they’d danced across the sand. He even thinks of the dragon, glowing eyes and rage, and he thinks of the way he’d felt when he saw Taekwoon transform back into a human—a breathlessness that he could not explain at the time. He sends his heart across the water with nothing tangible to show for it, and opens his eyes with a gasp.

“West,” he says into the wind, and although he can’t see it like Taekwoon can, he hopes it carries his words where they have to go. “I need to go west.”

He doesn’t waste time questioning the urge. He is the one sailing away to find a dragon, after all, something that shouldn’t really exist in the first place; strange compulsions are nothing in comparison to that. Instead he rushes back to the mainsail to hoist her, his smile wide—if a little grim—and a renewed tentative hope blooming in his chest.

 

***

 

He sails for five more days, heading due west the whole while.

He sees nothing. No land, no other ships—nothing. He’s not exactly surprised, because the ocean is a huge place and even when he traversed the same route on _Drachen_ week-in and week-out he would often not see a single ship until they approached the ports, but it’s still alarming given that he is alone out here. On _Drachen_ he had the familiarity of his crew. Here he has no one and _Drakon_ , although a beautiful yacht, has her quirks that he’s just starting to get used to. His food is starting to run low, too; not so much that he has to turn back, not just yet, but enough that he is just beginning to get worried about it.

Most days he eats on the deck, enjoying the feeling of the wind of his face and the peace that being on the open ocean provides him. On the fifth night he prepares dinner—of canned beans, which nearly makes him laugh—and when he ascends the companionway to eat, he finds that the sun is setting in a blood-red sky, casting the sea in front of him in startling shades of scarlet and ochre. It’s mesmerising. He takes a seat on the bow and watches, holding a hand up to the light to watch his skin glow.

 _Red sky at night, sailor’s delight_. The last time he’d seen a red sky had been in the morning—they’d huddled together under Hongbin’s lean-to, Hongbin basking in Taekwoon’s warmth and his smile, and that night they’d slept in each other’s arms.

How could he not have _known?_

He stays on deck until the sun sets completely, dusk turning to twilight turning to true night. The only light emitted out here comes from _Drakon_ herself; there is nothing more pitch-black than the open ocean at night, and if at first it had unnerved him, now after more than a week at sea it’s just business as usual. He tidies up his dinner, does the washing up, and then starts preparing for overnight sailing—even though he only manages to get about four or five hours’ sleep a night, that’s still four or five hours where there’s no one at the helm, and _Drakon_ sails herself. The weather is expected to remain clear, the GPS tells him, but he already knew that given the red sky and so doesn’t worry himself too much.

He curls up on the bed, pulls his blanket over him, and just like every other night, thinks of bones and sand as he drifts off.

 

***

 

There’s a speck in the distance.

He wakes up before dawn, immediately checking the GPS and autopilot, which both report nothing of importance, before grabbing an apple for breakfast and standing at the wheel to eat it, thoughts empty. The sun rises from behind him, but it’s not until it’s fully daytime that he can make out the speck, and squints at it suspiciously.

It could be the island. Or it could be a ship, or another island, or another country, even; he has no idea what to expect. He isn’t even sure if he’ll be able to find the island in the first place—he is still following that nagging little urge at the back of his mind, west west west west, but that urge does nothing to explain away the island’s magic. As Taekwoon had said, it’s kept hidden from prying eyes. Maybe it let him go in the first place for a reason, and has concealed itself from him entirely. Maybe Taekwoon has flown away and gone to the north to be with others of his kind. Maybe Hongbin will have made this journey for nothing.

But over the course of the day, the speck grows bigger, and when Hongbin comes up on deck in the mid-afternoon his legs give way underneath him suddenly—he knows that shape, he recognises that shape, he’s been seeing that shape in his dreams and nightmares for months—

It’s a huge dragon skull, rising up out of the water like a beacon.

He nearly trips over himself as he gets up, taking up position behind the wheel, heart beating in his mouth and throat and stomach and something that might be panic surging though his limbs. There’s barely any wind, and where before that would not have bothered him, now it is unacceptable. He lowers the mainsail and stows the jib, dropping back down into the cabin and turning the key to ignite the diesel engine. He hasn’t used it once the whole time he’s been at sea, and it coughs and splutters a few times before growling into life, and he guns the throttle.

He stays light on his feet, ready to make an about-turn if the island suddenly turns wild and rejects him. But the water remains clear and glassy as he approaches. His field of view is narrowed down onto the skull and he sees nothing else, knows nothing else—he nearly screams in frustration when he realises that he’s not going to be able to get very close, seeing as the water around the skeleton itself is scattered with other bones, the wing ones being the most dangerous because they lie just under the water and he can’t see them from this vantage position. He gets as close as he dares, throttling down to idle and slowly drifting in, and then drops anchor a few hundred metres offshore, making sure _Drakon_ is attached securely before jumping off the side and into the water.

The sea is warm and welcoming as he strikes out for shore, swimming frenzied and hurried. His thoughts are consumed with nothing but Taekwoon, Taekwoon, Taekwoon, but lurking somewhere in there is a strange reassurance at seeing the island again—he has missed it, he realises; not missed it just for Taekwoon but missed it on its own.

His feet find rock underneath him and he hauls himself up, nearly laughing when he recognises exactly where he’s standing: he has returned to where the island deposited him time and time again, where he first washed up and where he kept washing up. “Taekwoon!” he screams, loud enough to hear his own voice echoing off the rocks. _“Taekwoon!”_

There’s no answer.

“Taekwoon!” One tentative step forward. “Taekwoon! I came back—” Another step forward. “Taekwoon?” His voice is getting desperate now— “Taekwoon, I—”

In answer there is a roar, and the dragon descends from above.

In the months since he left he has forgotten its size. He can hardly fathom that once he thought it merely big, not enormous—it lands on the rock in front of him and the whole ground shakes, and he can’t imagine anything bigger than this. It is just as savage and strange as he remembered, and when it swings its head around to train its glowing eyes on him, he feels a slow shiver run down his spine. It’s not fear, not exactly. It’s a deference, an acquiescence to a battle he knows he can’t win. But more than anything all he feels is an almost overwhelming sense of relief and affection, burning through his veins, chasing away any dregs of doubt. He knows instantly that coming here was the right thing to do.

“Taekwoon,” he begins, but that’s as far as he gets.

The glow begins in the dragon’s chest. Seeing it up close and not blinded by panic, he can see that it does not spiderweb out like it does on Taekwoon’s human body; instead it is an even shape, spreading from its left side—presumably its heart—over its whole chest, up its throat. He knows instantly that it means to burn him alive and moves before thinking. He darts over the rock to take the dragon’s head in his hands—it’s warm, its scales leathery and soft to the touch—and pulling it close to hug it as best he can.

There’s a second where nothing happens, and then the dragon leaps away from him, roaring and looking as affronted as a dragon possibly can. It sounds absurd, but there’s intelligence in those eyes and on that face; Hongbin can’t read it as well as he can human emotions, but he can gather that something has changed. The glow has disappeared, not just from the dragon’s chest but also from its eyes. More importantly than that, it’s cowering away from him as if he has hurt it.

“I’m sorry,” he says, taking a tentative step forward, extending a hand. The apology has been burning in him for months, and it feels good to get out, better than he thought possible. “I’m sorry I—I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, and I’m sorry I left.” Another step. The dragon shrinks back. “I know you’d never hurt me. And the truth is I left because I was afraid, but not afraid of the dragon. I haven’t been afraid of the dragon for a long time.”

At these words the dragon glares at him and snarls, a throaty, heavy sound. But it does not glow, and it does not move, so Hongbin keeps going. “I was afraid of loving you,” he murmurs, his truth, all he has not dared to acknowledge, and as the words leave his mouth he feels something in his chest crack and break, some shackle loosening. The dragon’s eyes widen in something that could be shock, and Hongbin stops advancing, spreading his arms out wide. “I love you, Taekwoon, whether you’re a dragon or whether you’re a man. And I know—I know that might be impossible. And that’s okay. You can—you can do what you like to me. But I just, I needed to say it, I needed to say that I love you because I haven’t been able to think about anything else since I left.” He takes a shaky inhale and lets it out, breathe, focus, an echo of the motto that kept him going. But this time he does not compartmentalise, does not lock away his feelings. “I don’t think my life has any meaning without you.”

And he closes his eyes.

His mind is empty. He half-expects the flames, to feel himself burning; instead he hears nothing but the dragon’s breaths, and then quiet thuds, and then a warm head is pushing itself against him.

The dragon is nuzzling him, looking up at him with an expression that Hongbin can’t read, but that’s okay. The response to his words is clear enough, and he flings both arms around the dragon in response, holding him close and ignoring the tears filling his eyes. He’s warm, he’s so warm; Hongbin has missed that warmth, more than he believes, and when the dragon dissolves into embers in his arms and he finds he’s holding Taekwoon instead, he nearly sobs. Instead he just leans in and kisses Taekwoon, sweet and gentle, and Taekwoon holds him and he no longer feels like he is floating away. In fact, he has never felt this anchored.

 

***

 

They can’t stop touching. They make their way back up to to Taekwoon’s cave holding hands, settle on the sand leaning against each other, eat while practically in each other’s laps. They don’t talk very much, either—they’re both just basking in being reunited, stealing small kisses here and there because they can, because they want to, because it’s right.

“I love you,” Taekwoon whispers, and in the glow of the fire his skin is alight and Hongbin wants to die, not out of anguish but simply because of how beautiful he is. “I should have told you before you left—I should have said it properly—”

“But you said it now.” Hongbin cuts him off gently, encouragingly, reaching out to pat Taekwoon’s cheek in a touch that lingers. “So it’s fine.”

“I could not live without you. It hurt—it hurt too much. This is the first time I have been a human since you left.”

Hongbin blinks in surprise at that. “You’ve been a dragon this whole time?”

Taekwoon nods. “It turned the hurt into something bearable. Lessened it, in a way. Dragons feel things differently. I would have gone mad otherwise… I nearly did regardless.”

“I didn’t know if you’d be here. I thought you’d maybe go to the north—”

“I could not leave.” Taekwoon looks away into the fire, eyebrows drawn together. “I thought that since the island let you go, maybe it was a sign. That it let you go because it knew you were going to return. It was a fantasy, but I believed it. And then a few days ago I saw words in the wind, your voice—I thought I was going mad. I did not… really think that you would leave your life behind and come back to me.” He shifts, drawing an abstract pattern on the sand with a finger. “What was home like?”

“Bleak,” Hongbin deadpans, which makes Taekwoon look at him in surprise. “My crew survived the wreck, believe it or not, but everything was just… bleak. There was a tribunal… I was put on trial, basically. Questioned about what happened to _Drachen_ over and over again. For a while I thought they were going to throw me in jail… but instead I was just fired. I felt nothing. I was so numb it was scary. I just felt so—lifeless. Like part of me had died the day I left here.”

Taekwoon turns to him at that, cupping his cheeks, thumbs tracing gentle lines along his cheekbones, fingers tangling in his hair. “I love you,” he repeats, and leans in so their foreheads touch. “I love you.”

He will never get sick of hearing that, never.

 

***

 

They sleep that night in Taekwoon’s cave, simply because they can’t be bothered to move, and when Hongbin wakes up and they go up to his cave he can see why Taekwoon wasn’t all that eager to move. As a dragon he’d clearly ripped out the lean-to in a rage, and although Hongbin isn’t really angry he bitches and moans as he trudges over the torn fabric, organising it in a messy pile.

After lunch they swim out to the yacht—the look on Taekwoon’s face when Hongbin had told him she’s called _Drakon_ was priceless—and board it. It’s quite jarring to see Taekwoon in a modern setting; he looks distinctly out of place as he wanders around on the deck and down below, opening cupboards and pulling out everything just to look.

“There’s a bag for you in the aft cupboard,” Hongbin calls, and Taekwoon brightens and nearly rips the cupboard door off the hinges in his eagerness to get to it.

This Hongbin had packed months ago, long before he even properly contemplated coming here, and had deliberately stashed in one of the cupboards in an attempt to forget about it. It’s full of books (including one called _Waltzing for Beginners_ ) and things he thought Taekwoon would enjoy, like a radio, a few seeds of different fruits and vegetables, and something that he’d put in on a whim but had forgotten to take out again. “Hongbin?” Taekwoon calls, coming up the companionway with a little bottle in his hands. “What’s 'personal lubricant'?”

“Oh shit you weren’t meant to find that,” Hongbin blurts, and before he can think he grabs the bottle from Taekwoon’s hands and pitches it overboard.

He’s flushed red and Taekwoon squints at him suspiciously. “Is this a human sex thing?”

“How do you even know that—”

“Some of the books I read have sex in them!” Taekwoon folds his arms over his chest. “It is, isn’t it?” And then much to Hongbin’s chagrin, he simply walks over to the side of the deck, leans over, and plucks the floating bottle from the water. “Must be pretty important if you are that embarrassed over it—”

“Oh my god, give me that.” His whole face is on fire, he knows it is, and yet Taekwoon is petulant and holds it over his head where Hongbin can’t reach. “Yes, it’s a sex thing, I put it in there one night when I couldn’t sleep and it was a dumb idea—”

Taekwoon leans in and kisses him, and this kiss is not sweet and chaste like the others. Instead it’s simmering, barely burning with heat that Hongbin can sense Taekwoon is holding back. “It is not a dumb idea,” he murmurs, eyes suddenly serious.

They move the things they need to bring back to the island into a waterproof bag and swim leisurely back. This time it’s Taekwoon’s time to complain—“you couldn’t have bought a rowboat too?”—but when they get back to the cave and set up the radio, which surprisingly has reception, he stops complaining and instead starts reading _Waltzing for Beginners_ while listening to the faint strains of music coming from the station they’d found.

 _How could I live without him?_ Hongbin thinks fondly, already sewing up the tears in his lean-to fabric. _How did I think I could live without him?_ Life on the island isn’t perfect, but now he has a way to get back to civilisation if he needs to—and he probably will, at some point, for the sake of his own sanity and appetite—he knows he could easily spend the rest of his days here. The only thing that brings as much joy to him as this is the ocean, and here he is surrounded by her, a friend once more. The past four months of numbness feel like a distant dream.

Taekwoon looks up and catches Hongbin’s eyes, smiling widely. “You look happy.”

“I am,” Hongbin replies softly. “More than I thought I could be.”

Taekwoon dog-ears the book—Hongbin reminds himself to carve him a bookmark so he stops doing that—and tosses it aside, crawling across the swathes of fabric to kiss Hongbin. It’s sudden but not unwelcome, and Hongbin lets Taekwoon push him down onto the sand, the kisses once again morphing from gentle to heated, their touches growing slowly more fervent. It’s not until Taekwoon’s hand trails down Hongbin’s waist to rest on his hip, lower than he’s dared touch before, that Hongbin understands and pulls away. “Taekwoon,” he says, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. “It was presumptuous of me to bring lube with me—we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

“I want you,” Taekwoon murmurs, “in every way possible, and even some that aren’t.”

It’s the most explicit thing he’s ever said, and it’s not even all that explicit—but Hongbin flushes red and bites down on his lip to quell the moan rising in his chest. “Please,” he manages to get out, although his voice wobbles rather alarmingly.

He’s still caught up on the headiness of being able to touch; when Taekwoon sits up and pulls off his shirt to lay back down again, the heat of him is nearly unbearable. He’s so _warm_ , and there’s so _much_ of him—oh, if Hongbin wasn’t mad before, he certainly is now. It’s not even like he’s inexperienced; when he was first appointed to _Drachen_ as second mate, sleeping with men and women both in ports all over the world was an exciting way to kill time. But he has never felt like this. Never has he been seared from the inside out just from a hand trailing down his chest, warm palm-prints pressed into his skin, and never has he heard anyone moan like the way Taekwoon moans when Hongbin threads a hand through his air and pulls it delicately.

They take their time getting naked—honestly, for a while, Hongbin would be happy just with this. It’s not until Taekwoon’s belly brushes against his cock that the arousal spikes once more, and he gasps, feeling powerless and too-powerful all at once. “Taekwoon, touch me,” he begs, and Taekwoon understands immediately. He doesn’t wrap a hand around Hongbin’s cock, though. Instead he dips down to take Hongbin’s cock in his mouth, movements unsure but earnest, and Hongbin groans and lets his head drop back onto the fabric.

They are a tangle of bodies, heat and cool, lost in pleasure; Hongbin has his first orgasm in Taekwoon’s mouth, Taekwoon swallowing Hongbin’s cum easily, and then he jerks Taekwoon off until he cums on himself, writhing and stretching in the late afternoon light. It feels ridiculously hedonistic to be fucking practically out in the open like this, but there’s no one around to see them, and being able to see the sun set as the afternoon wears on into early evening just somehow makes it all the more special. They lie in an exhausted puddle for a while, dozing, and then Hongbin starts kissing his way down Taekwoon’s chest, body and blood thrumming for more.

“I want you to fuck me,” he breathes into Taekwoon’s belly, and Taekwoon whines at the words.

It’s awkward logistically, as first times always are; Hongbin ends up on Taekwoon’s lap, hovering above him somewhat nervously. “Are you sure—”

“Please—”

And so Hongbin eases himself down onto Taekwoon’s cock, wincing at the sting that’s pain at first, slowly turning to pleasure as he stretches and gets used to the sensation. He’s so wrapped up in his own head that he doesn’t realise Taekwoon’s glowing until he looks down, and makes a garbled noise of panic. “Oh, God, Taekwoon please don’t turn into the dragon right now—”

“I am not going to,” Taekwoon murmurs, and his voice isn’t strained in the slightest. When he meets Hongbin’s eyes he smiles encouragingly, although the effect is made less comforting by the tinges of red in his eyes. “I have control, now. You have given that to me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Hongbin murmurs, and starts rocking, fucking himself slowly on Taekwoon’s cock. “Sure about that?”

It’s amazing to watch Taekwoon fall apart in a way that has nothing to do with the dragon. He’s so pretty covered in a film of sweat that lights up orange in the dying light, the moans he’s making echoing off the rock, the kisses he’s pressing to Hongbin’s shoulder clumsy. There’s love between them, Hongbin’s never felt that before, never expected to find it here, but it’s there regardless and it makes him close his eyes and lose himself to the pleasure. It doesn’t take long before Taekwoon’s panting, hands pressing into the flesh of Hongbin’s hips so tight he’s sure he’ll have marks, and then he arches his back and whines and comes, and it’s fucking beautiful.

“Love you, _toreizei_ ,” he mumbles, head lolling forward onto Hongbin’s shoulder.

Hongbin freezes. “What does that mean?”

“Untranslatable,” Taekwoon slurs, eyelids flickering and closing. “Something roughly like ‘love of my life’ but more, more intense—”

He’s cut off by Hongbin grasping his face and kissing him, the love inside him spilling over. _Toreizei_ , he whispers into Taekwoon’s lips, a promise, a bond, sealed and made forever.

 

_fin_

 

“Are you sure about this? Because this is really not what I thought you meant when you asked me if I wanted to ride you.”

At the quip Taekwoon raises an eyebrow, but he nods, still deadly serious. “I would not have asked if I was not sure, _toreizei_.”

It’s an honour, sure. Hongbin’s probably one of the only humans to be invited to ride a dragon ever. But he’s also afraid of flying, and afraid of falling off. Logically he knows that if that happens Taekwoon will catch him, but—still. The upside is that the one thing he isn’t afraid of anymore is the dragon, although it doesn’t feel much like an upside when they’re standing on the top of the spires, as high as they can get. It rather feels suicidal.

But it’s important to Taekwoon, clearly—he wouldn’t have asked otherwise—and so he sighs and nods, twisting his hands together behind his back to hide his anxiousness.

The transformation this time is not so explosive. The glowing starts in Taekwoon’s chest as usual, spreading through his body until he disappears into light, but Hongbin doesn’t stagger back in fear when the dragon forms where he was standing, glow fading from its eyes and neck rather quickly. Instead he just approaches the dragon and pats him on the neck, pats turning to scratches along his wings—Taekwoon’d told him it felt nice and sure enough the dragon starts groaning, if such a word is appropriate, eyes closed in such bliss Hongbin starts giggling.

He’s stalling, he knows he is. His heart is beating fast in his chest—no doubt Taekwoon can hear it—but there’s nothing he can do about it because then Taekwoon flattens himself on the ground, the invitation obvious.

Hongbin takes his time getting his balance. It seems straddling the dragon’s neck and holding onto his horns is the best way to go about things, although when Taekwoon stands up he yelps and clings on for dear life. He’s never ridden a horse before but he imagines it’s something like this—it almost feels like he’s riding a wide barrel, legs wrapped as tight as he can get them around Taekwoon’s neck. “Oh, God.” He starts babbling as Taekwoon turns to look towards the sea. “Oh fuck, Taekwoon, I’ve changed my mind, I don’t think I can do this—”

Taekwoon pays him no heed and leaps over the edge into a freefall that has Hongbin screeching like a banshee. The wind is whipping his face, hurricane-strength, and all he can do is hold on as best he can as they plummet towards the rocks. He is sure he’s about to die, but Taekwoon opens his wings at the last moment, catching a current that sends them skimming over the water and his screams die away in his throat. It’s _beautiful_. Terrifying, sure, but also beautiful, and in stable flight like this he can lean forward to level himself against Taekwoon’s neck.

They fly over the water for a short while before Taekwoon begins a gentle, sweeping turn that brings them back towards the island, swooping around the giant ribs and vertebra, passing around the west side of the skull before Taekwoon begins to climb. He barely seems to expend any effort; no doubt he’s reading the wind currents and letting them carry him, but it’s an odd sensation, to be gliding through the air nearly soundlessly. The fear is still overwhelmingly present, but less so, especially when Hongbin looks down to see the island spread out beneath them. He has never seen it from this perspective before and it’s amazing to see the true size of the dragon skeleton, enormous and somehow comforting; he can pick out _Drakon_ still anchored near the dragon’s neck. The water beneath them is the most inviting blue colour, flat as glass, and as Taekwoon turns to the right he knows that what he’s looking at is his home.

“Okay,” he says some time later—Taekwoon’d told him he wouldn’t need to yell, since dragon hearing is sensitive and he’d be near Taekwoon’s ear anyway, but the temptation is still overwhelming given how high up they are—“Okay, I get it now. I get it.”

At this Taekwoon looks back over his shoulder at Hongbin, his one visible eye seemingly saying _told you so_ , and then before Hongbin can tease him he folds his wings in and they go plummeting towards the water. But now Hongbin can recognise this for what it is, a game, and his screams morph to howls of excitement as they fall. Taekwoon will keep him safe. Taekwoon will _always_ keep him safe, and he starts laughing when Taekwoon opens his wings again, catching a breeze and soaring up once more.

He never thought, when he’d first saw the dragon explode into being and burn _Escape_ , that he’d be here like this one day—but he cannot find it in himself to regret, not with the sea below and an open horizon in front, all the possibilities in the world theirs for the taking, all the promises echoing between them. He doesn’t feel afraid anymore. Instead he just feels free, and he knows that this is what Taekwoon has given him.

“I love you,” he murmurs, and in reply Taekwoon lets out a roar that has Hongbin covering his ears and wincing as it echoes out over the sea. He doesn’t speak dragon, doesn’t know any words beyond _toreizei_ , but that’s okay; he knows what Taekwoon means.

_I love you too._

 

_with a final effort_   
_I strike out across the swells_   
_seeking only the answers_   
_maybe horizons hold_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so! this is based on the awesome russian movie he's a dragon (Он – дракон). when I started I planned to just use the movie directly for inspiration and set it in medieval times, but the more I wrote the more it made sense to change it and set it in a modern universe. the first time I watched the movie, last year, I knew I wanted to write something based on it, but it wasn't until my 3rd rewatch that it combined with my newest fascination, shipwrecks, and this idea took root. 
> 
> sooo yeah this is a behemoth, I honestly predicted it'd top out at 25k max, not 60k LMAO but I'm really really proud of it, I hope you enjoyed! I wanted to make it kind of ethereal and spooky? I don't know how well I did tho. I did a bunch of research for this fic, as you can probably tell by the references chapter (which is very much optional reading!), and I even made my poor long-suffering stepdad read it because he's a sailor and I am not LOL but it was all super interesting stuff!
> 
> special thanks to to ellie & k, for the handholding and beta-reading and encouragement, and alex for putting up with my oversharing. yall are the realest! lyrics at the beginning and end from _alone_ by parkway drive. if you need some visual cues for the island, [here's a thread](https://twitter.com/hakyeonni/status/1054001441323409408) of screenshots from the movie I made a while back!
> 
> thank you for reading and i hope you enjoyed;;; ♡


	5. References

As part of research for this fic, I did as much reading as I could, particularly on shipwrecks and sailing both as I am not a sailor. Feel free to stop reading here if you wish—these are just some sources I found interesting, and just me geeking out about said sources. Very much optional.

 _[“The Clock is Ticking”: Inside the Worst U.S. Maritime Disaster in Decades](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades)_ by William Langewiesche  
This article is a fascinating read and is actually what sparked my interest into shipwrecks when I found it linked on reddit. Langewiesche’s writing style is captivating, and the way he plots out _El Faro’_ s last fateful journey—and the background behind it—completely draws you in. _El Faro_ was the inspiration for _Drachen_ ’s fate.

 _[A Sea Story](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-story/302940/)_ by William Langewiesche  
Another article by Langewiesche (after discovering him I read all his articles for _Vanity Fair_ and _The Atlantic_ simply because I love the way he writes, and he’s covered some very interesting topics), this covers the sinking of the _MS Estonia_ in 1994. This is yet another peacetime maritime disaster, although the way Langewiesche writes this one is even more chilling than his piece about _El Faro._ The imagery stuck with me for a long time.

[ _Run the Storm: A Savage Hurricane, a Brave Crew, and the Wreck of the SS El Faro_](https://www.amazon.com/Run-Storm-Savage-Hurricane-Brave-ebook/dp/B078MDKGNJ) by George Michelsen Foy  
I wanted to read a more detailed account about _El Faro_ ’s sinking, so I bought this book and I’m glad I did. It’s very, very detailed, but Michelsen Foy does a good job at helping the layperson understand the terms used even if the writing isn’t the best. I’ve been interested in plane crashes for a long time, so I understand the principle that every major disaster does not occur in a vacuum; there are always a series of tiny cascading choices or mistakes that lead up to the final event. This book examines those cascading choices one by one and explains very thoroughly how _El Faro_ sunk.

 _[All Is Lost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Is_Lost)_ directed by J.C. Chandor  
I watched this movie a long time ago but rewatched it as part of research for this fic. It stars Robert Redford as an unnamed man whose yacht is hit by a stray shipping container in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This movie made me anxious as shit and kept me on the edge of my seat, but it also provided some helpful visuals as to what’s actually involved in sailing a Cal 39.

 _[I Am Dragon (Он – дракон)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He%27s_a_Dragon)_ directed by Indar Dzhendubaev  
Last but certainly not least, the movie that started it all! I really don’t have enough good things to say about this movie. It’s a bit cheesy, but the beautiful visuals more than make up for it. You should watch it. Seriously. It’s good.

Some other references I used:  
<http://sailingmagazine.net/article-538-cal-39.html>  
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Drake> (<— the ship _Drachen_ was based on; it was grounded on a beach in my state when I was a child and made front page news for a few weeks)  
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_El_Faro>


End file.
